Yeah, I think that part of what makes a good engineer / good employee generally is the ability to recognise and work within the constraints of the organisation / team without spending all your time whingeing or proselytizing for the One True Way of doing x. This is quite difficult as developers as a breed have a tendency towards binary thinking and engaging in doctrinal disputes. I actually agree that dependency sprawl / hell is a problem best avoided... which is why I avoid web development like the plague. I think Rachel's broader point that the terms we use to describe developers / software engineers are very broad and sometimes unhelpful is right. I think she's being a snob in wanting to retain the high status term for what she does, while dismissing the stuff that she obviously struggles with as being not engineering, but I do think we shall take care to distinguish between high level engineering that largely consists of integrating existing libraries / modules etc. and lower level engineering that she engages in because they are different skills.