Sure, there are programming errors that can have significant impacts, and cost lives when things go wrong. When that happens, it's so unusual that it's front pa

Sure, there are programming errors that can have significant impacts, and cost lives when things go wrong. When that happens, it's so unusual that it's front page news, warrant man-years of investigations, and entire PhD theses are written on methodologies to avoid that error. For software engineering in mission-critical systems, there are methodologies to test and retest, to test the tests and evaluate the whole system from all angles, and the final product is the responsibility of a team who have months or years to take every possible precaution that the software performs as it was designed. On the other hand, trauma room surgeons have minutes, sometimes seconds to decide whether to cut left or right of the trachea of this guy who was just rolled in and of whom they know nothing, sometimes not even the name, let alone medical history; and oh they need to hurry because there's another guy being rolled in who is also leaking blood out of every possible orifice, plus from the 3-inch hole in his chest. Of course it's easy to make comparisons between people at two opposite ends of the spectrum - sure, that first year in the discovery room in a due diligence isn't going to make a world of difference if he misses one contract with a company 10 years ago that went out of business but for whom, technically, the acquiring company could still have a 10k USD liability if they miss one little stipulation in the contract. My point isn't that programmers never do important things, or that everything that doctors or lawyers do is mission-critical; but in the aggregate, and in the overall scheme of things, I think it's a clear and shut case that the potential influences of wrong decisions or errors by doctors or lawyers are more severe, in terms of potential human suffering, and harder to prevent, than those by the most programmers. Take even a lowly divorce or pro bono criminal defense lawyer - forget to file that motion? Whoops, you just cost your client half of his life savings and he'll be flat-out broke for the next few years, or he'll be in jail for years. I mean, I like to thing that my work is pretty important too, but let's get some (objective) perspective here.