DozyWannabe said "Trust me, if you'd actually studied Software Engineering at even an undergraduate level, you'd quickly realise it's a discipline that shares the same reliance on repetition, models and a*se-achingly dry textbooks filled with complex graphs and barely-comprehensible formulae as engineering of any other stripe. Are you stating that as far as you're concerned the only "real" engineering exists in the physical realm?"
Yes, that's exactly what I'm stating. If it were real engineering it would be impossible for so many dolts to make money doing it. And the dress-up process for done for it, those ridiculous texts which are a mockery of knowledge compared to, say, the laboriously wheedled out facts of turbulent flow, make it look all the more like an aging strumpet.
Systems integration, which may or may not contain software components, is real engineering. That said, programming and networking are in their best forms elaborately detailed crafts that require extremely skilled craftsmen to execute - and how many of these have I met in my lifetime? Perhaps three.