Professional Engineer certification exists for software engineering and requires testing on and then swearing to a code of ethics. Though the code of ethics you

Professional Engineer certification exists for software engineering and requires testing on and then swearing to a code of ethics. Though the code of ethics you swear to doesn't cleanly apply to the challenge you present, I've often thought more SWEs being professionally certified and bringing the ethics and standards to their field would bring benefits on many fronts. It's easy to see when designing reactors, or building bridges that your work and decisions can directly impact human welfare and correspondingly I have seen a very high standard of attention to detail, standards compliance and ethics in those fields. When designing software systems and applications it's harder for some to see, but the potential impact is still present.