Yeah I'm not really blaming individual software engineers (I'm in the same boat, fighting a slow trickle of feature after feature without really being given a chance to step back and consider the overall design & its future evolution), but the industry as a whole. As I said in another comment in this thread, all too often SEs are just tasked with cooking sh*t to vague spec (as laid out by sales & other non-engineers) instead of being active at the earlier stages where engineering should already begin.

It's like sales people together with the customer decided the shape and colour of the bridge, as well as the number of pillars it has, and how many lanes it has, and what material it's made of -- here's the stack of things you build with -- and what other fancy features it has, and now finally we can call the engineer so they can hop on a bulldozer and start engineering with their hammer for the next two weeks and show the result so we can adjust the shape if it's not as pretty as we imagined. Actual engineering didn't happen.