If you're gluing stuff together and hoping it's not going to fall apart too often you're not doing either. That's precisely what the majority of "software eng

If you're gluing stuff together and hoping it's not going to fall apart too often you're not doing either. That's precisely what the majority of "software engineers" are doing nowadays. That's what web development is. Those that are creating tools other developers use and build things using algorithms/data structures in novel ways (essentially applied math as you said), they are the real software engineers in my eyes.