Maybe for smaller companies, or if this were 2012. Not sure about this now for FAANG. Engineerieg processes are deeply prioritized these days.

This doesn’t track with my experience in industry whatsoever. In fact, those sorts of “low ethics” programmers are arguably the biggest hiring risk, and large amounts of effort and dollars are put into avoiding hiring them.

Also most of what "software engineers" are asked to work on are not engineering problems. There are of course exceptions, but the vast majority of positions labelled "software engineer" aren't doing anything that would really be called engineering. You are just wiring frameworks together to achieve some goal and reading the documentation to figure out how to make it work.

> Trying to raise a software engineering discipline to the standard of the real engineers would leave you with an employee too expensive to do what his professional ethics wouldn't allow him to.

Nah. The vast majority of software projects are of the lower echelon variety e.g., the slapdash shopping cart web apps. Considering JavaScript is still the language of choice in that realm, engineering rigors can’t exactly be of any real consideration.

No, it’s not the expense keeping real engineering away, it’s the culture.