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Edsger Dijkstra, who could be somewhat abrasive at times (he called "Carl Friedrich Gauss, the Prince of Mathematicians but also somewhat of a coward") said in his essay "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science" (EWD1036):
A number of these phenomena have been bundled under the name "Software Engineering". As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot.".
Is this true?