To call any software monkey an engineer is laughable. Engineers are generally responsible for a system catastrophically failing. In IT it's seen as a natural consequence of progression. It'll take another 3-5 generations before we have the proper body of knowledge to even have an engineering culture.

Even then though I'm not sure it'll ever really improve. Even beyond the human element I feel like the incremental building approach cannot and will not lend itself to ordered systems. Unless we go back to the ecosystem of objects that Kay talked about back in the 80s we'll always create frankenmonsters, and even if we do: we just create another kind of frankenmonster.

The amount of bush-league mistakes I see because people truly don't know any better is shocking. But we've gone from a world where you had to very intimately understand the machine to do your job, to one where a six-month crash course of very specific web technology is enough to net six figures. What did we expect?