What Really is Software Engineering

In school we learn how to make a function that does x. In technical interviews we are asked to write a function that does x. But in a day of true software engineering, you may spend the first 30 minutes writing x and the rest of the day supporting x. Lets walk through all the steps it takes to deploy x. Ok fine, we can give an example of x for sake of the article… lets say x is a function that takes in a username and password and looks it up in a database to see if the user exists and returns true of false if they do. 30 minutes. Done. Now for the real work… as a software engineer, you will be…