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Really? All the situations you mentioned were people who were trying to save others. My point is the engineers needing to review their work that killed others.
by aristophenes 7y ago
Really? All the situations you mentioned were people who were trying to save others. My point is the engineers needing to review their work that killed others. That's different. A doctor can't save you from a heart attack, that's tough. A doctor accidentally kills you while removing your tonsils, that's kind of a big deal. A doctor that kills 100 people by prescribing the wrong medicine, maybe goes to jail, gets sued to oblivion, and is probably an emotional wreck.
I'm talking about, what if you had to watch only your mistakes, out of hundreds of millions of interactions, where your code caused a car with a passenger but no driver to have a fatal accident.
It seems to me this is worse even than military members who sign up knowing they will kill people, and struggle with worrying if they killed the wrong people in the wrong way, or should have hurt anyone at all.
- ThrowawayR2 7y agoYes, really. If you don't like the above examples, there are plenty of grisly incidents from the early history of engineering for railroads, aviation, automotives, and spaceflight to pick from. For example, the Apollo 1 crew burned alive during a flight rehearsal gone wrong (https://www.space.com/17338-apollo-1.html https://www.space.com/17338-apollo-1.html) because of poor engineering decisions. All of them were trying to improve people's lives or achieve something new for humanity. What makes software development different?