"Imagine coming to work to spend hours googling, wiring together unbelievably shitty, amazingly poor documented frameworks and battling Javscript and CSS."
That's definitely not a software engineer routine. Engineers craft/architect solutions instead of "wiring shit together". Of course, being able to re-use existing stuff is part of the job but if your job is wiring things together, specially if you do not know how those things work, you're not a software engineer.
That said, there are different software engineering gigs with different level of difficulties and solving different kind of problems. I like the advice of specializing, getting into more computer science, but that's still software engineering.
Don't get fooled just because the market is full of shitty web development gigs, that's a small portion of "software engineering".
That's definitely not a software engineer routine. Engineers craft/architect solutions instead of "wiring shit together". Of course, being able to re-use existing stuff is part of the job but if your job is wiring things together, specially if you do not know how those things work, you're not a software engineer.
That said, there are different software engineering gigs with different level of difficulties and solving different kind of problems. I like the advice of specializing, getting into more computer science, but that's still software engineering.
Don't get fooled just because the market is full of shitty web development gigs, that's a small portion of "software engineering".