You can also pay to have software built. The specs will not be even remotely as precisely defined and the building of the product will not even remotely follow a standardized set of steps. It will come down to a team and individual programmers implementing features as they see fit.
Software that was running space shuttles was famously engineered. The costs in terms of time and money was astronomical.
> Yes, poor engineering is rampant. But I will argue that malleability also plays a large role in the delta. In traditional engineering you build a car (and you are “done”). In software you build a car and get asked to make it an aeroplane without going back to the drawing board.
Which is why it is not engineering. It is a craft much closer to writing a novel than it is to engineering as it looks in other disciplines.