Its difficulty and uniqueness is why it just hasn't been 'engineerized' or 'engineerified' yet. It's still a craft, as opposed to an engineering discipline. As such, that means the quality of the software produced by any shop is going to vary according to the organization's standards, which is their combination of management and engineers. Sometimes management is very business-schooly in their perspective, sometimes more engineery. That boundary layer and how it is treated by the top of the hierarchy makes all the difference.

I was summer programming in an IT department in the late 80's; it was under the auspices of the comptroller, simply because the org didn't know where else to put it. Management was still figuring out which department would have the budget/cost stuff allocated to it. You can forget about engineering excellence or even semblance of IT knowledge.

Everything since then has been the (in)organic growth of IT in the situation that, for the vast majority of companies, IT is simply a cost whose benefit is hard to quantify, especially to the money guys, who are always the ones in charge.