> If software engineers were engineers, testing would be a higher priority, and visible regressions would happen rarely, if at all.
That would mean they were doing their jobs badly. All engineering requires balancing priorities such as physical strength (or in software, correctness), and cost. An engineer who overbuilds everything 10x will quickly be out of work.
When correctness matters less than business results, then your role has passed from engineering into business. Software is somewhere in the middle. Software engineers are often informally expected to own the results without owning the profits.
Cost is an important constraint in engineering. Nearly every engineering project has cost as a component of the engineering process as omitting it yields projects that cannot be completed.
If you could create and patch buildings incrementally like software, you don't think people would do that?
Correctness in itself is not a meaningful goal. If something works well enough to meet the needs of the user, being more 'correct' doesn't necessarily provide more benefit.
That would mean they were doing their jobs badly. All engineering requires balancing priorities such as physical strength (or in software, correctness), and cost. An engineer who overbuilds everything 10x will quickly be out of work.