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It's what I consider the difference between a software developer and a computer-systems engineer to be.

I'm likely the outlier, because my early mentors (college + first couple years of career) were mostly aerospace engineers or chemical processing equipment engineers, where safety is critical. Code can kill in both those fields. (They themselves had adapted a lot of systems and failure mode analysis from mech engineers in the same field.)

I don't think that the mitigations I pointed out require much technical work though -- most of them can be as simple as a single setting, extra program installed during build (and maybe a couple config settings), or a single cloud monitoring rule (eg, detecting launches). They do, however, require adhering to policy, discipline on the part of staff, and analyzing the full scope of your tech (and how it interacts). I guess my point is that these things often aren't done because of ignorance or haste rather than engineering cost (or legitimate need to be done faster).

It's just we have poor standards for what "engineering" is in tech, so we don't cross our 't's and dot our 'i's the way a mechanical engineer is expected to.

But that's no reason not to try and raise the bar.




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