> The industry as a whole used to be more aligned with engineering but this has changed considerably since, say, the rise of "Agile".
I'd argue that it changed once smaller businesses could afford (and have room for) their own computer. My best guess would be somewhere around the PDP-8 era (late 1960s-early 1970s).
Once things started to move away from large-scale computer rooms and consoles of blinking lights, towards a more "hands-on" and interactive approach, where the programmer didn't have to wait between "batches" of runs to see what their code did (correct or not), that is when (from a software development point of view) so-called "engineering" went out the window.
I'd argue that it changed once smaller businesses could afford (and have room for) their own computer. My best guess would be somewhere around the PDP-8 era (late 1960s-early 1970s).
Once things started to move away from large-scale computer rooms and consoles of blinking lights, towards a more "hands-on" and interactive approach, where the programmer didn't have to wait between "batches" of runs to see what their code did (correct or not), that is when (from a software development point of view) so-called "engineering" went out the window.