> "Software engineering estimates and plans often fail to live up to the reality that follows. It seems to be the only engineering discipline in which this is regularly the case."

Yeah... nearly stopped reading after that opening statement. There are many reasons why software engineering is different from other forms of engineering. And maybe those reasons are enough to not call it engineering. Personally, I don't think that's particularly relevant.

But wildly exceeding estimates is definitely not something that distinguishes "real" engineering from software.

Real world engineering often has the advantage of working almost exclusively with known quantities. But add a variable, like digging a tunnel through an unpredictable underground, and sometimes projects go off schedule by years.

No engineering discipline can predict the unpredictable. Some disciplines are just younger than others, and therefor have more unpredictable elements.

The big difference with software engineering is that the costs of failure are so relatively low that we prefer to go full steam ahead instead of trying to find ways to reduce uncertainty.

This makes software engineering an outlier. Everything else is just semantics.