The power of software is how it 1) moves a lot of work from the domain of the physical to the domain of the written and intellectual and 2) the way it can be re

The power of software is how it 1) moves a lot of work from the domain of the physical to the domain of the written and intellectual and 2) the way it can be replicated at scale. So it really isn't like engineering, more like writing, but industrialized. Well, at the application level at least, where a lot of software work happens. The work that actually allows written software to physically interact with the machines it runs on, that's engineering, but generally not what most "software engineers" work on. Anyway, it's not really so surprising that there are few hard and fast and replicable rules in "software engineering" as there really aren't in, say, essay writing. There are best practices and tips and techniques that are generally more effective than others. And there _are_ actual constraints around software that don't exist around essay writing as, ultimately, software does have to translate to real physical limitations like available memory and such, but the abstraction away from those physical limits is by and large the point and purpose of software.