It is strange that people who work with an entirely logical medium -- software developers -- continually want to pretend they are 'artists', 'craftspeople', 'artisans', 'writers', 'performers' even. It is some kind of delusion. If you design systems by some logical understanding of their component properties, and some experiment where things are incompletely known, then you are doing engineering. And there is nothing wrong with that! It does not mean the job is automatable or predictable -- engineering requires insight, judgement, and creativity.