I always found it interesting that there's a discipline called 'Software Engineer', the dictionary definitions for engineer are as follows:
design as an engineer; "He engineered the water supply project"
a person who uses scientific knowledge to solve practical problems
mastermind: plan and direct (a complex undertaking); "he masterminded the robbery"
the operator of a railway locomotive
I never really thought that this was a good fit for what I saw a person who creates software as doing, a few years ago I read the book Hackers and Painters (second link is to the original essay)  by Paul Graham and the ideas he presented really clicked with me. In short, writing code is more like the work a carpenter engages in or even a paineter...there is a high degree of creativity in what we do, not just the mindless assembly of component parts; not putting down engineers...more the 'software factory' concept where devs and even whole teams are used as interchangeable parts assembling software. Now I've met devs who fall into this category, no real creativity in their work and happy to cut 'n paste their way through a development career...hey they're valuable for what they do but they're nowhere near being a 'proper dev'.
Anyway, just a random thought I was having today when talking to an old friend who's working with an outsourced development team...they take specs and crank out code but they have no real buy-in to the product and the architecture they produced is causing huge problems
(quote 'they just don't care...they deliver against each use-case but the code is clumsy, hard to read and hard to maintain').
I lament at these slipping standards, when I was a consultant I saw this all the time...managment measuring progress against checkilists of use-cases with no insight into application quality (metrics help but they still can't get the 'feel' of the code). I still have memories of sitting in a lab running scalability tests against an application with the development team vascillating whenever the CTO asked them a question, meanwhile the app (which was developed literally at a cost of millions of pounds!) was inelegant, fulfilled it''s purpose but wasn't created with any passion...bah!
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