The poor ontology backing the term software engineer has always seemed to me like the primary culprit for this problem. I've often heard people doing any of the following for their day job referred to as software engineers:
- people who write basic static sties
- people who write wordpress sites
- people who write simple CRUD apps
- people who write hardware drivers
- people who write compilers
- people who write databases
- people who write google-scale distributed systems
- people who write graphics engines
- people who write physics simulation systems
- people who write video games
The complexity, depth of abstractions, and expected maintenance lifetimes of these tasks vary wildly, but because we all write source code we're all counted as doing the same job! Sort of an obvious lunacy, different mistakes will punish each of these jobs differently than others.