Much of programming is working with complexity, not engineering.
If you know from beginning to end how to do something, then you can engineer. You can form processes to govern the engineering, you can compute some things to be just right, you can make some nice tradeoffs and eventually you're finished. You could build a bridge like that. You could build a GUI like that. Or the 10th website of similar functionality. Or the 100th half-assed C-library replacement because your project can't or doesn't want to depend on the standard C lib on all platforms.
Most importantly, basically, much of what could be engineered often gets automated. Programming always happens on the edge of unmanageable complexity and anything less than that gets quickly automated. That leaves very little to be engineered. Basically you engineer something if you insist on not being lazy and doing it by hand.
Throw in a "minor" scalability requirement, or a guaranteed response latency of less than X milliseconds, or some "easy" dynamic "addition", or some "basic" interoperability mechanism to another program, and suddenly your engineerable bridge must be designed to support a million tonne UFO the size of Manhattan that keeps gleaming in the temperatures of several thousand Kelvin.
To conclude: Software engineering does happen but only after the software has been written enough many times so that we actually have experience in doing it, and often for only a short while until the engineering part can be automated and programmers released to work on something more complex.
Software is so tricky that you don't want to redo it too many times unless you really, really have to.
If you know from beginning to end how to do something, then you can engineer. You can form processes to govern the engineering, you can compute some things to be just right, you can make some nice tradeoffs and eventually you're finished. You could build a bridge like that. You could build a GUI like that. Or the 10th website of similar functionality. Or the 100th half-assed C-library replacement because your project can't or doesn't want to depend on the standard C lib on all platforms.
Most importantly, basically, much of what could be engineered often gets automated. Programming always happens on the edge of unmanageable complexity and anything less than that gets quickly automated. That leaves very little to be engineered. Basically you engineer something if you insist on not being lazy and doing it by hand.
Throw in a "minor" scalability requirement, or a guaranteed response latency of less than X milliseconds, or some "easy" dynamic "addition", or some "basic" interoperability mechanism to another program, and suddenly your engineerable bridge must be designed to support a million tonne UFO the size of Manhattan that keeps gleaming in the temperatures of several thousand Kelvin.
To conclude: Software engineering does happen but only after the software has been written enough many times so that we actually have experience in doing it, and often for only a short while until the engineering part can be automated and programmers released to work on something more complex.
Software is so tricky that you don't want to redo it too many times unless you really, really have to.