I think a key defining trait of engineering is the necessity of having a correct, precise model of the domain you are working in, so that you can solve multifac

I think a key defining trait of engineering is the necessity of having a correct, precise model of the domain you are working in, so that you can solve multifaceted problems with the minimum possible resources. A typical non-engineering characteristic of software is the widespread acceptance of techniques/libraries that claim to make development easier at the cost of increased(outsourced) complexity and efficiency. I think a design technique that (allegedly) allowed you to spend half the time in a CAD software, but the resulting part would be less sturdy and more expensive to make wouldn't be exactly popular. Yet this is the bread and butter of software engineering, and since waste can be arbitrarily big, directly results in Wirth's law, with software consuming the extra resources and regressing to barely acceptable performance. Imo, one of the places when real engineering happens in the software world is video games. Here, there are actual constraints are very tight - one has to simulate a believable world, display 60 frames of meticulously calculated graphics on a clockwork cadence, synchronize players over an unreliable network in real-time, and so on and so forth. And do these things on cheap console hardware whose designers often favored raw performance over ease of use, sometimes to extreme degree, like the PS3. I'm pretty sure I barely scratched the surface. Yet it's commonplace to see chat applications crawl to a halt (Teams) and use enormous resources, while having a fluid UI in a game that just happens to run flawlessly beside a fully rendered 3D game world is considered the price of admission, not some technical feat.