health inspector is a literal job that needs to know how messy the process of making the sausage is, so they can enforce health standards so nobody gets sick when eating it.

if you're calling what you're doing engineering, you are following a standard best practice, and should easily be able to run through a checklist and show your work at each step.

not every thought needs to be expressed sure. its irrelevant what you thought about your lunch. Its important how you picked what latency numbers are important, and how you went about predicting volume, including what factors your did and didnt look at.

software developers havent been rigourous engineers over the last several decades, and that isnt a good thing

Disagree. This how people best learn from each other. It's also nice to audit your own thought process objectively.

It makes one vulnerable though, that's for sure. Psychologically I mean.