I think the problem is that "assembly line" manufacturing has always been the wrong analogy for software engineering. A better analogy would be like a construct

I think the problem is that "assembly line" manufacturing has always been the wrong analogy for software engineering. A better analogy would be like a construction contractor or a machine shop. How many machine shops are not run by a machinist? Perhaps an interesting extension of the machine shop analogy is that many organizations do not run their own internal machine shop. If they need a part, they find a shop that can make it. Software naturally tends need more ongoing maintenance and attention than machined metal parts, but I think there's an argument to be made that perhaps companies should be less eager to hire software engineers, and more eager to hire an agency. Moreover, assembly line manufacturing is suited to a very particular scenario that software engineering is almost never in: high volume, high rate production of exactly identical things, which can be broken down into individual components.