> The time is way overdue for IT engineers to be subject to professional liability, like almost every other engineering profession. Before you tell me that is i

> The time is way overdue for IT engineers to be subject to professional liability, like almost every other engineering profession. Before you tell me that is impossible, please study how the very same thing happened with electricity, planes, cranes, trains, ships, automobiles, lifts, food processing, buildings, and, for that matter, driving a car. But the people responsible for the Colonial Pipeline are not Software Engineers. SWEs are just workers. Why don't we start to hold the people accountable who extract wealth and give orders? Power and responsibility should go hand in hand. SWEs _want_ to engineer, make things more performant and secure. They _want_ to say No to unnecessary features. This takes time, trust, money. What about the owners? The board? The executives? They make the decisions, want fast growth, more features, less expenses, software to be a commodity and engineers be interchangeable. Managers and sales people, who buy and sell software packages with fancy names on them to get a promotion, don't do the soul sucking work of integrating with a buzzword driven hodgepodge. Shouldn't they be held accountable first? With that out of the way... The example in the article is the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack. A cyber _attack_. Are bridges, toilets and buildings generally built to withstand arbitrary hostile attacks? But Lack of understanding of how decisions in the IT industry are made, ridiculous examples and bad analogies aside: I still think there is a good point hidden in there somewhere. Namely that good engineering takes time, investment, auditing, standard processes and a strong technological foundation. But we are not there yet. Nobody is laying the foundation to get us there. It's just iterations upon iterations and layers upon layers, features upon features. Before we can even start to think about licensing SWEs, we need to start thinking _very_ long term. Much of the SWE effort is funneled into short term monetary gains, while fundamental technologies like OS's common file formats, browsers, firmware and all that stuff is rarely reconsidered and just patched over continuously. The foundations are _inherently_ insecure and the mindset is wrong. Familiarity and productivity often take precedence over simplicity and robustness. Everyone thinks they are entitled to telemetry and other user data and most software is closed source. How do you reason about black boxes? How do you trust them? Also who will do the licensing? The people who tend to push for these things while shitting on other software practitioners don't inspire much confidence IMO. I have so many questions...