The snark is not warranted. Those techniques are absolutely fine when you are building mail order catalogs on the internet.

I think the underlying issue is that when it comes to safety, privacy, and security, even if people aren't dying in a plane crash, you still need to do it with a basic level of competence. You cannot roll back a privacy leak.

Now if you're talking about features that don't touch these things, go nuts. And there lies a second issue: the identification and distinction between what stuff is "go nuts" and what stuff is "do it right the first time". You can't approach every project with the latter or you'll waste so much time in the design phase when really you should just throw your new CSS theme out there and see how it goes. But you just can't approach the "account creation" feature the same way.

Until privacy leaks have more than 0 consequences, why would anyone care to prevent them?

Basic morality? Do you consider yourself a good person? Do you do the right thing, even when nobody is forcing you to? Do you steal when nobody is looking?

And yes, corporations aren't people, corporations don't have morality, I've heard all those excuses. Those corporations are comprised of people and those people should not be held to a lower standard.

The "on hull loss" bit addresses the fact that the discussion is around much more critical software. I didn't read it as snark.

The snark is warranted if you call yourself (generic yourself, not you in particular) a software "engineer" - but yeah, if your ego's content with "developer" then the snark's not warranted.

It's the job title the company gave me so I use it. No deeper meaning to me.

Even NASA shipped a computer with known severe failure modes for the Apollo vehicle.

NASA was also doing things that were never done before.

The 737 Max is much worse at doing things that were done much better for decades before it.

This was 60 years ago in a desperate race with the Soviets and with an expendable flight crew. Hardly comparable conditions to commercial aviation.

You can have a known risk/failure mode, and risk manage it.

It's another matter entirely to pass on the flawed device to a third party with no preparations and warning. Then people die.

> Those techniques are absolutely fine when you are building mail order catalogs on the internet.

Given that attitude, it's no wonder 99% of software out there is utterly bug-ridden.