> because of lazy developers

Why would you assume it's the fault of the developers? For all you know they could have been lumped with a 2 month deadline for a 2 year task, no push back, and just did the best they could.

I know PE licensing doesn't in general make a lot of sense of software. I read all the discussions on HN on this topic with a lot of interest. I agree it's not even a perfect system for traditional engineering.

But consider this: say you were a licensed engineer, and writing shoddy code you would face the risk of losing said license and not being able to practice in the future. Yes, even if "your boss told you to do it". You are the engineer, you are the professional, it's your ass on the line if lives are lost or damaged. Then your choice is either pushing back and risk to get fired, or don't push back but risk to lose your license.

I'm sure this change from country to country, but at least in my country you don't need to be "licensed" to be held liable because of the damage you do and you can be disqualified to do that job.

My point being that better software is not going to be written just because the people writing it is afraid of losing their license or being held liable, because in many circumstances that can already happen.

The problem here are not only the developers and the crappy code. Some people here put this thing in production knowing that it was faulty, or once they knew it didn't work as expected they did all they could to hide this for years, blaming others of their own mistakes.

And yes, I agree we need to be better. But it's very important to understand that many of the potential licensed software engineers that are already writing crappy software today and will continue to do so if licensed because they just don't know better.

Everybody just doing their job. This relates to the system that is society. When something is broken we just convince ourselves that everything is working as expected. People get hurt from it but we don't really care enough to question it and make the changes necessary to fix it.

It's a problem of management, not th developers. Either the developers were allowed or pressured into shipping a defective system

The management of society is the politicians and government. People following orders of government when something is broken... hmm, what time period did that happen?

Do you think developers should have any responsibility for the quality of their code? In this thread, I see a lot of developers who like to think of themselves as "software engineers" trying to evade responsibility in a way that would shock members of any other engineering profession.

Not saying no when you should say no is a form of laziness known as cowardice.

You can say no all you want, but it doesn't matter when your "no" gets overridden by your manager's "yes". You can even quit over it, but there's a whole line of people waiting to replace you (yes, everyone, even you, is replaceable). Lazy developers have nothing on greedy managers.

What does there being others who will do a bad thing have to do with whether I do something bad or not? Is there an opportunity cost to refusing to enact or participate in criminal or immoral acts? Should I do something like that simply because I am potentially fungible?

I can't understand that logic.

Personally, I would and I have said no to work I find immoral. I was also fired, on the spot, for saying no to something that was illegal. The company then threatened to sue me. I threatened to sue them back and they backed down, and I found another job within days that paid more because, like most people in tech, I'm in demand. That company is now dead.

We can all afford to be more choosy.

Its one thing for someone's product to suck because its slow, or even crash prone. Its another completely for it to display data wrong. I don't accept that its acceptable or normal. In my industry if our core applications did this it would be a massive regulatory scandal and wouldn't be tolerated by anyone.

I've been saying it for awhile that these kind of critical systems where lives, large sums of money or crucial infrastructure are on the line should fundamentally handle their software differently than the rest of the industry. The 737 Max crashed because the developers weren't held to the same standard as the aerospace engineers who built the plane. This account system failed because the developers weren't held to the same standard as accountants are. Why should developers get a free pass?

We need to stop treating all software with the same degree of validation and assurance. Some things are more important than others and should have legally codified practices and liability.

Was Fujitsu aware their software was intended to be used as evidence to prosecute? It doesn’t sound like it to me.

If Google’s autocorrect mistakenly writes a falsely incriminating text that is inadvertently used as the sole evidence to convict, do we jail the autocorrect developers?

Yes, they were involved in the prosecutions and had their own internal coverup.

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252509066/Fujitsu-escape...

Did those developers show up at trial attesting to the translation? It sounds like Fujitsu was doing custom data extraction from the Horizon system for the explicit purpose of prosecution then showing up to testify as to the credibility of that data.

> do we jail the autocorrect developers?

Google is liable for defamatory autocomplete suggestions (in Australia) [1], so that's not such a stretch of the imagination.

[1] https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/trkulja...