In professional engineering the accountability comes with a stamp, and a professional ethics requirement to report up the chain if a critical problem has been f

In professional engineering the accountability comes with a stamp, and a professional ethics requirement to report up the chain if a critical problem has been found that could impact public safety. This includes whistleblowing if management ignores the problem. There are clear guidelines as to what types of products and services require a p.eng.'s stamp. There are also many professional engineers out there who's stamp has never touched ink. For example, the engineers drafting and churning out spreadsheets in the engineering sweatshops aren't accountable for the safety of the product, you'll have one or more engineers providing their stamp for that group's work. If we were to implement a similar model on software development, most developers would not have personal liability for work they do e.g. for a company or open source project. What is needed is better classification of software products/activities that require a software engineer's stamp[1], and a corresponding professional association. So no, developers should not be accountable. However, certain safety-critical products - where safety can be defined in various ways expanding the current relatively small set of NASA, aviation and health-care software - need engineers overseeing design, development, and QC to be accountable. And yes, this means that the self-taught developer, no matter how talented, will not be able to release certain types of software without some sort of oversight. [1]As a side-note - not everyone can call themselves an 'engineer' in other fields without the proper credentials and professional membership. I see developers calling themselves software engineers all the time though they don't have the chops. This would, of course, need to change. Updated to change asterisk to brackets