If you think of a software system as a manufacturing plant, you can make some pretty straight analogs to other engineering functions. I know plenty of engineers

If you think of a software system as a manufacturing plant, you can make some pretty straight analogs to other engineering functions. I know plenty of engineers who work at auto plants, power plants, or the like whose jobs are much more traditionally engineering and look a lot like what a modern software job on a distributed system look like. The core business is modeled and run through the software. Things break and will need modification over time, so the engineers are always present. It's not that software is outgrowing engineering. It's that software is growing to look more like other professional engineering disciplines. The businesses we support are predominantly the professional services you list, so maybe a mental model of a professional services factory is where we're headed? You're certainly not wrong that software engineers need to be comfortable in those environments, but I suspect there's a bit of motivated reasoning among those who see our career becoming more like doctors, lawyers, and accountants, though I would love that to be the case. If anything, those professional jobs are looking more like engineering jobs over time as their own moats have been eroded. Aren't the software engineers coming along to make those professional careers look less special? I'm watching all the local dentist and optometrist offices get purchased up by chains instead of a new generation of small business owners. I'm not aware of another profession which has risen to those ranks, so I suspect their current place is merely a historical relic which is passing.