If you actually wrote software, then you would know that that creating software and the process of invention are (often) one and the same. Perhaps you are implying that because programmers make use of tools and shared libraries written by other programmers, that their creations are somehow merely cobbled together components that happen to work well. Programmers are NOT assembly line workers, nor does software write itself. Where a problem appeared unsolvable, a software "developer" has invented the solution.

Here's another angle. Chip design these days is usually done completely in a description language like VHDL or Verilog. The engineer does not lay out the transistors by hand. Hence, the engineer's creation is literally software cum hardware. You would have us believe that just because the electrical engineer has produced something he can touch that he is an "inventor" while the software engineer is merely a "developer".

Or perhaps you mean that the pot that cooks AND drains pasta is an invention, and Bayesian spam filtering is just a bunch of 1s and 0s.