As I haven't seen a link to it in the comments yet: A while back Hillel Wayne put some effort into resolving the question of "Is Software Engineering Real Engineering?" with the crossover project: https://www.hillelwayne.com/talks/crossover-project/

The conclusion he drew was that there's less difference than you might expect between software development and "traditional" engineering disciplines and that it's reasonable to consider software engineering a real engineering discipline.