Everybody makes mistakes, but that's no reason to never apologize.

Look, if I genuinely screwed something up, sure, I'll apologize and either way I'll fix it. But if I didn't test some corner case because the software takes 30 minutes to build, another 30 minutes to start up, and can't be run without a live database and crashes with an out of memory error after it runs for more than 30 more minutes and no time has ever been allocated to improving the code quality because that's "low priority to the business" and the fix was one of the 20 I had assigned to me in this two-week "sprint", then I don't owe anybody an apology. If you think you can find somebody better, be my guest.

> In some cases imprisonment and an utterly ruined career are the result of mistakes

This is quite an exaggerated point; the number of people imprisoned for making mechanical, civil, or electrical engineering errors is very close to zero in the US.

I think more programmers have actually been charged than any other field, although I can't quote a statistic to back that up.

Architects absolutely have gone to prison for building something in a shoddy manner that results in death.

You're conflating the difficulty of doing something "right" with the result of not doing so.

Also the environment in which this happens is completely irrelevant.

Try working in military applications, aerospace, tax software, medical devices, banking. Making one mistakes can affect the fates of hundreds if not millions. It's way more responsibility and risk than the job you quote.

By the way. A dentist gets to try on fake tooth before drilling a real tooth. They actually don't have a choice, that's part of the mandatory training. Doctors gets to train on real people too, medicine schools go to great length to procure bodies for training purpose.

In programming, one would be lucky to get any sort of test environment.

> A dentist gets to try on fake tooth before drilling a real tooth.

Are you saying you went straight to writing production code before you ever studied any software engineering? Sounds unusual for practitioners of an industry endowed with such a critical responsibility.

A dentist can easily kill someone through malpractice... There's no code review, there's no test environment, and there are always difficult (often time-sensitive) decisions to make and difficult people to deal with.

If all you know is estimating story points and merging pull requests to make your burn-down chart look pretty you probably shouldn't be so confident that your profession is more difficult or more superior than one that you have no understanding of.

A software engineer can easily kill tens of people with a typo. Medical devices have a ton of software and it's only increasing.

Medical staff have the equivalent of code review and test environments. Non-routine operations have always multiple people in the room. They have bodies to practice on.

Do yourself a favour and drop the attitude. Medical and software industries both have some very difficult jobs.

Especially a test environment that accurately mirrors a production environment.

GP meant "harder" in the "it's possible to get things "perfect"" sense, not in the "leads to a more challenging professional life" sense.