You say that you "know because you get paid to code", but that's only half of the picture. To really know you would need to work on the other side, in what you call "real" engineering. An insider is much more likely to see the flaws in their own discipline.

I worked for 3 years in power plants all over the world, including dams, and there were delays, cost overruns, structural defects, flouted safety measures, etc. Not really the civil engineering utopia that HN raves about.

Note that I'm not saying that it's OK for software engineering to suck because civil engineering also sucks. Both should try to improve.