In Greece, we do take an engineering oath to graduate: in summary to nurture and expand science and to improve and protect human welfare. In a similar fashion,

In Greece, we do take an engineering oath to graduate: in summary to nurture and expand science and to improve and protect human welfare. In a similar fashion, in Canada they have the iron ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring. IEEE and almost all of the serious engineering organizations have a code of ethics. Accountability of the management is what is missing. If a hospital management instructs their doctors to skip costly steps in a procedure, they are going to jail. If any engineering company screws up and lives are hurt, lost or damaged somehow (e.g. privacy), they issue a public apology; rinse and repeat. Which is ironic, as "a doctor might screw up and kill a few patients, but if you as an engineer screw up you can kill thousands." Because you are not there holding their hands when people get hurt, get their identity stolen, their money or lose their lives due to a bug or critical error, does not make you less responsible. The problem with our field is that i) it has immaterial direct results, ii) big failures have big money behind them. The first makes it hard to impossible for the public to understand the implications and does not excite terror if you are not directly involved. How many people run in fear hearing about "x credit company got hacked"? The latter reason implies that there is an incentive for no punishment -- similarly to banking institutions in 2007. I think we are unfortunately a lot of the times swaying between being a statistic (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/21/death-statistic/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/21/death-statistic/) or having insignificant or incomprehensible impact for us to gain legal power to push back. Recall that deep learning, distributed ledgers, etc are magic or demonized by the public. P.S. One could argue that not all software developers are trained engineers etc, but I am not buying that. As a lot have noted even if a person is not academically trained they can take an oath, but nothing is going to change in the responsibility realm.