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If you design a bridge that collapses in a way that could be anticipated, you screwed up. Software can fail in ways no one's thought of yet, as evidenced by us
by kstrauser 2y ago
If you design a bridge that collapses in a way that could be anticipated, you screwed up. Software can fail in ways no one's thought of yet, as evidenced by us still finding new classes of bugs. And even when you write perfect software, it's impossible to know that it's going to evaluate correctly when built with an arbitrary compiler on an arbitrary OS running on an arbitrary hardware platform. Something perfectly fine on Clang/macOS/ARM might be busted on GCC/Linux/x86.
Engineers have to be responsible for their work. If you held software engineers to that same legal standard, the occupation would be sued out of existence within a year, even for people who are doing everything possible to do it right.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoAs a devil's advocate: engineers are so often told to not do things the right way (skip tests, go faster, implement ethically questionable code, etc) that a license can give an engineer some weight. Of course if they ignore a licensed engineer, they'd have their version of "Against medical advice" to sign off that liability to the company. Sure, there's still be unknown unknowns that come up and screw over the engineer, but I imagine a lot of the lawsuits would be redirected to the companies that prioritized shipping any kind of slop over all these engineering principles.
- kazinator 2y agoIf you are a licensed engineer that happens to be doing software, you can probably play that card.
- kazinator 2y agoThose people would be the first casualties, because they would be working where the stakes are high.