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All those engineers need to be hauled up because they’re killing people. Software engineers by contrast are high performance: barely any fatalities and so much value created. It’s why it’s not construction firms that are the most valuable companies but software companies. You can count on software engineers to build things that won’t kill, for the most part. Other kinds of engineers, on the other hand, are constantly killing people.

We need higher standards for engineers. They could learn from software folks. If you can’t do it safely don’t do it.




I have a friend who works in a hospital. Apparently the hospital software they use constantly freezes for like, 30+ seconds while they're trying to get work done.

Meanwhile my friend has had her passport, entire medical history and all sorts of personal information leaked by Medibank then Optus, within a few months of each other. Neither company as far as I can tell has been held in any way to account for the blunder.

Meanwhile the Post Office Scandal is rocking the UK - where a software mistake landed a bunch of completely innocent people in jail and led to multiple suicides.

And don't even get me started on the impact of social media.

We might not kill as many people as engineers. Maybe. But we certainly cause more than our share of harm to society.


Software engineers destroy plenty through data breaches, lost time due to (often deliberately) terrible design, etc.

If organizations and software engineers were held to account for data breaches, we'd have a whole new landscape.

Lives are lost to software failures as well.


How many lives have been destroyed by leaked personal or payment data?




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