It's a slap in the face that we tack engineering onto it. A very small percentage of software engineering is as rigorous as actual engineering.

As an actual engineer who moved into software "engineering", yes this. It kills me.

Top three things lacking?

(In your personal opinion)

Fads and fashion over strong, tested technology.

Attitude that you can fix broken stuff later and customers are fine with it.

Charlatans and fuckwits everywhere who wouldn't last a second in a traditional engineering discipline.

Checks out.

and thank you!

As someone who works in a few different engineering disciplines, I think software engineers often have a very rosy picture of other areas of engineering. The problems are different, but things are not any better on average.

If it makes you feel any better, I don't think that's the case in most of the non English speaking world.

Mostly we're just called programmers.