You are drawing the distinction along the wrong boundary: it's not software-vs-' real'-engineering, it's public-safety-critical vs not. There are in fact softwa

You are drawing the distinction along the wrong boundary: it's not software-vs-' real'-engineering, it's public-safety-critical vs not. There are in fact software engineers that work in the former, and most non-software engineering actually still works in the latter. And yes, a big, expensive expensive failure can be fatal to a company, but only if they've set themselves up to depend on it. (I've in general seen this strange sort of reverse-chauvinism from a good number of software engineers, who seem to believe that other engineering fields work in some much more regimented and consistent way to software. From someone who's worked in both, including seeing how the sausage is made on safety-critical automotive and medical devices, trust me, they're not much different: all that regulation barely pulls up the minimum bar a teeny tiny bit, at great expense)