I have to remind myself that in "real" engineering there are (in theory) no surprises for the well understood physical processes at work.
There is never a new and immature "gravity library" that requires you to rework your existing designs to cope for new slightly different acceleration due to gravity, the "metal fatigue" library does not introduce new unexpected bugs randomly, there is no reason for the "corrosion library" not being able to be used at the same time as the "average human adult male height library" due to obscure dependency issues, you never have shoe-horn in the "compressive strength of concrete" functionality that was originally out of scope but sales now say is P0, you never have bugs like unexpected-yet-sufficiently loud sound waves overflowing to tiny negative values etc and causing a "negative sound area" or something weird and hard to conceptualise.
I.e. physics itself is largely unchanging. We have worked out the fundamentals and they don't really change - gravity never flips direction, bounancy always goes "up" etc - and we're not building on top of a ship that is built on top of another ship that is built on top of a hovercraft that is built in top of raft that is built on logs that is built for a fresh water environment but you are using it in salt water due to the CEO being buddies with someone, but the people building the ship only see the first turtle beneath them.
Also, it's a different scale of importance. GPs criticisms are fair but is anyone in their right mind really willing to pay for a bulletproof blog system? Most software is simply not under the same set of requirements that these "real" engineers are. And where they are, you see more "real engineer behavior".
The standards between Blogging, Banking, and Aerospace are each drastically different and sequentially more rigid. Thinking that we as software creators are failing because we're not holding ourselves to the standards of Aerospace and beyond feels like complaining that some high school kid working at McDonalds is not holding himself to 5 Star Restaurant standards.
You get what you pay for. And you typically pay for what you (think you) need.
It's more than that. I'm a software dev, but I worked for a company that built machines for autonomous underwater titration (wtf chrome. How do you not know "titration"), and even in that nightmare of a task (moving parts, chemistry, batteries and underwater) it all ends up being way more consistent than software. When things fail, they tend to fail consistently and reliably, so building towards a reliable machine tends to be a simpler process. There is still complexity, (arctic and deep water applications), but often you can solve problems by just overbuilding the fuck out of it and not worrying.
Oh, but there's new libraries out there: less in the physics (which remain as fundamental as the unchanging principles of computer science and mathematics) and more in the applications. For instance, right now I type this I am sitting in what is, last I checked, the tallest modular building in the world: parts assembled at factory offsite, and trucked in by crane. In other construction techniques, we can see things like 3-D printing, in variants that range from "extruding concrete in boring square shapes on the foundation" to "laser-sintering alloys into exciting new organic designs".
There are exciting new materials, as well; would you consider building with cross-laminated timber? Would you build a plane with carbon fiber? Okay, how about one with a maneuvering characteristics augmentation system?
(POSTSCRIPT: Just checked, not the tallest anymore.)
> I have to remind myself that in "real" engineering there are (in theory) no surprises for the well understood physical processes at work.
That's not true. Tons of sht goes wrong in civil engineering projects. Like the ground moving, or it is not strong enough to support your building, or the workers bailing on you, or suppliers changing the product, or suppliers delaying a shipment, or suppliers going bankrupt, etc...
I think the difference is that it is mostly* redoing the same thing over and over again with minor challenges overall. Whereas in software development you are starting new every time for every new project.
There is never a new and immature "gravity library" that requires you to rework your existing designs to cope for new slightly different acceleration due to gravity, the "metal fatigue" library does not introduce new unexpected bugs randomly, there is no reason for the "corrosion library" not being able to be used at the same time as the "average human adult male height library" due to obscure dependency issues, you never have shoe-horn in the "compressive strength of concrete" functionality that was originally out of scope but sales now say is P0, you never have bugs like unexpected-yet-sufficiently loud sound waves overflowing to tiny negative values etc and causing a "negative sound area" or something weird and hard to conceptualise.
I.e. physics itself is largely unchanging. We have worked out the fundamentals and they don't really change - gravity never flips direction, bounancy always goes "up" etc - and we're not building on top of a ship that is built on top of another ship that is built on top of a hovercraft that is built in top of raft that is built on logs that is built for a fresh water environment but you are using it in salt water due to the CEO being buddies with someone, but the people building the ship only see the first turtle beneath them.