At a former workplace (medical systems), they had a very cool and highly useful informal policy where they'd require every programmer to attend a surgery as early after being hired as possible (ideally within the first year or so).

Obviously everyone in this field knows how important it is to get things right. But actually seeing it is pretty mind-blowing.

It's the same for everything else, really -- with medical devices it's just easier to connect the dots and figure out why it's important. But technology touches people's lives in very unexpected ways.