There are real engineers out there who wear safety boots, hard hats, supervise 100s of tradesmen and labourers.  When they screw up it takes millions of dollars to fix the problem.  And yes, they went to university for 4+ years and did hard subjects like math and physics as well as their advanced subjects in their specialisation (civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical, etc)<p>Software engineers and IT project managers have it very easy - it is only through their lack of real world experience that they think that what they do is hard.  Real engineers see them as whinging, precocious pansies.<p>Once you get over that culture shock, you start appreciating your choice of software wrangling as a profession.