I don't know what software engineering is ans I strongly suspect you don't, either. I fact, I think that software engineering is just a term invented to give non-programmers (professors, managers, consultants) a somewhat technical career path. There is certainly no engineering happening when someone creates a new web service or a new device driver. I don't think there's engineering involved in Amazon's latest cloud service or googles latest feature.

Regardless, programming is a craft. And programmers are essentially crafts(wo)man. Everything's handmade, there's only unicates, there's no formal education besides some guild rules (aka coding interviews) and the science of computing which tells you how and why a program works or doesn't but not how you create it.

There has been some research into actual engineering practices for software. But the underlying science often gets ridiculed, not applied, by practical programmers.

Every discipline needs to evolve and Crafting is how you evolve it. The fact that the software industry evolves too fast is because the domain it's applied to is very large and thus we are constantly finding out problems that need crafting.

> And yet, those people do not get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, believe their work to be at the height of economic efficiency, or think themselves generally more intelligent than the average person.

Designers can be payed more than a software engineer. And we don't know what they really think but there are plenty who think that they are better than anyone and are doing the society a big favor but people simply don't understand. (You don't have to go to far away from some software industry to find the most egregious examples of those :D)