Does it stop being an engineering practice because a vast number of practitioners are incompetent, and fail to practice engineering rigorously? Or is it rather

Does it stop being an engineering practice because a vast number of practitioners are incompetent, and fail to practice engineering rigorously? Or is it rather the case that it is an engineering discipline with frighteningly little done to train, apprentice, vet, and self-regulate its practitioners? Is it the nature of the work or the workers that define engineering? I'd argue the former, every time. As for 'the public good', that sounds like a convenient definition to make a point, but didn't seem like an actual boundary one can set, beyond perhaps the common bindings of engineering ethics blatantly missing in the software world.