I don't think that's really true in practice, though at a competence level it absolutely is. Except at the biggest places, even low level programmers are both empowered and expected to make architectural decisions that have big impact on maintainability, testability, and performance. Addition of a bad-but-fast coder to a team is the worst possible outcome because they are really productive at screwing up the whole codebase in ways that will take even more time to peel apart. It's actually worse if their code is in the "functional but ugly" category, since PMs love those people as long as they're really fast, and they hate when other engineers complain about their work.

In construction, the random guy pulled in to swing a hammer may cut something wrong once or twice and waste a little time and money, but he's never going to be trusted to design the way the support beams hold up the whole house, so the damage is very limited. Software is not like that, we expect everyone to do some amount of design and engineering, whether or not they have any ability to do so. If as much software dev was driven by very low-level grunt work as is the case in construction, LLMs would already have revolutionized the field a lot more than they have; as it is, we've probably got another couple years to wait.

This is true. Construction has had millennia to work out how to best organise its different disciplines, though -- I hope that it won't take software that long, nor that it'll need to be quite as stratified.

Software Engineers are usually quite capable programmers, while construction needs a lot more people _doing_ the construction than working as Civil Engineers, even if Civil Engineers wanted to join in.

That's not quite my point, though: we don't expect physicists to be good at Civil Engineering or construction, and we ought not expect Computer Scientists to be good at Software Engineering or programming. Having some understanding of physics makes a Civil Engineer better at their job, similarly for Computer Science and Software Engineering. And both construction and programming can be undertaken in isolation, but you're unlikely to be successful in your larger project unless you have Civil Engineering or Software Engineering expertise.