Actually I rather enjoyed the article, especially the opening bit about the pursuit of popularity destroying blog value, but you can't just pretend that software engineering is just simply a form of engineering still in its dark ages (though it's obviously cruder than traditional engineering disciplines). Computer science is an extension of pure math going back thousands of years, of which civil engineering is another only slightly older offshoot. The problem spaces are simply not comparable.

In civil engineering you are dealing the same constraints: physics, which can be refined to perfection because they will be used billions upon billions of times throughout history and will never change. In civil engineering the stakes are high, people will lose lives. Finally, the parameters for success are very easy to measure in advance... it's easy to calculate how much traffic a bridge will carry, and you can even render exactly what it will look like for aesthetic evaluation before construction begins at all.

Contrast with software where the problem space is infinitely larger (ie. the entire realm of abstract thought vs physical space, which also makes it less intuitive by people btw). The costs of failure and repair are most often trivial (especially for web software). And the suitability of software is often not known at all until it is delivered (in this regard architecture has more in common with software engineering). You can't just hand-wave these things away by stating that software engineering is an immature discipline. Even with the exact same number of man hours behind software engineering that you have behind civil engineering, there would still be a such a tiny dent in the problem space as to leave software engineering looking primitive.

It's not that no one takes software engineering seriously either, take military or NASA software. Those guys have the most advanced software engineering principles on the planet, but even there, it's specifically suited to their use case. I'm sure there's a lot we could all learn from them, but if you want Microsoft Word to have that quality are you prepared to pay $500,000 a head to run it?

I agree that Joel totally threw the baby out with the bathwater in the duct-tape programmer defense, but let's not disparage the state of software engineering. It's certainly much less disciplined than other forms of engineering, but that's simply a cost-benefit tradeoff that seems reasonably close to optimal.