> But ultimately there's always a software engineer involved in the creation of software - and that's not true of any of the other roles you mentioned. Since so

> But ultimately there's always a software engineer involved in the creation of software - and that's not true of any of the other roles you mentioned. Since software engineers are necessary and sufficient to produce software, they should always be held responsible, and any oath should fall on engineers. Nah, it's not the same at all. The fundamental difference between creating a program and medicine is creating a program only has to be done once, or at least a only by a few. Medicine on the other hand: it has to be redone with each new patient. If the Hippocratic Oath works to prevent 99.9% doctors from doing a harmful procedure then you've hit a home run. Sure, you will never completely stop some bad egg removing a perfectly good limb because a patient suffering from Xenomelia offered enough money. But who wouldn't call a thousand fold reduction a huge win. We demonstrably have the 0.1% of programmers who are willing to break any oath. They make malware, and willingly take out Sony as mercenaries because Kim Jong-Un got pissed off at a movie. All that 0.1% has to do is write the program once. Thereafter you are not trying to discourage hoards of high skilled professional from doing it again, you are trying to stop a legion of dark net operators copying the thing and selling it to anyone. An oath is a waste of time under those circumstances.