There's actually a potentially good article in here, about how the software development community is failing to uphold its obligations to the public interest.

Unfortunately it's struggling to escape from yet another entry in the tedious genre of "software engineer (sorry, programmer) who has never worked in, or even read a book about, any other engineering discipline assuming that he knows everything about how they work".

It's ironic that he cites the failure of the NATO "Software Engineering" conferences as evidence that software development is not engineering, when the idea of those conferences was that "programmers" would be the assembly-line workers in a software manufacturing process.

Software development is a design process, not a manufacturing process. That's why we call its practitioners software engineers:

http://www.zerobanana.com/essays/reclaiming-software-enginee...