I'd hate to be the engineer that has to deal with these requests. Not even a formal government investigation, just any number of random 3rd party researchers demanding specialized access.
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Let me know when devs get stamps that make them legally liable for their decisions. Only then will that honor be applicable to software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_en...
I worked with engineers, what we generally do isn’t engineering by the standards of those engineers.
Which isn’t to say that all software development isn’t.
People writing avionics software and medical software etc are doing what I’d recognise as engineering.
It’s about the process more than anything.
Software in the wild is simply a young field and we aren’t there yet widely.
> Collins Aerospace: Sending text messages to the cockpit with test:test
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45747804
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Think about how physical engineering orgs are formed. It's a collective of engineers, as it should be. The reason is that zero consequence management abstraction layers cannot exist in a realm with true legal responsibility. Real engineering org structure is written in blood.
I wonder what it will take for software to face that reality. I know that lack of regulation leads to faster everything, and I really do appreciate and love that... but as software continues to eat the world, there will be real consequences eventually, right?
The reason that real engineering liability goes back to at least the Code of Hammurabi is that people got killed by bad decisions and corner cutting.
What will that look like in software history?