this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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As a counterpoint to this articles counterpoint, yes, engineers should still be held responsible, as well as management and the systems that support negligent engineering decisions.
When they bring up structural engineers and anesthesiologists getting "blame" for a failure, when catastrophic failures occur, it's never blaming a single person but investigating the root cause of failures. Software engineers should be held to standards and the managers above them pressuring unsafe and rapid changes should also be held responsible.
Education for engineers include classes like ethics and at least at my school, graduating engineers take oaths to uphold integrity, standards, and obligations to humanity. For a long time, software engineering has been used for integral human and societal tools and systems, if a fuck up costs human lives, then the entire field needs to be reevaluated and held to that standard and responsibility.
This is why every JR Engineer I've mentored is handed a copy of Sysadmin Code Ethics day one along with a copy of Practice of System and Network Administration.
We really need a more formal process for having the title of engineer and we really need a guild. LOPSA/USENIX and CWA are from what I can tell the closest to having anything. Because eventually some congress person is going to get visited by the good idea fairy and try to come down on our profession. So it's up to us to get our house in order before they do.