When a levy breaks people die. Software maintenance and damage is nothing compared to real engineering.

It was never definitively proven but poorly designed software was considered to be at the heart of a helicopter crash that killed 25 people including almost all of the UK's top North Ireland intelligence experts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Scotland_RAF_Chinook_crash...

Software controls everything from nuclear power stations to missles to dams to radiation therapy machines (where, again, software killed 3 people - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25)

Proper software engineering is increasingly more important and, I'd posit, likely to become even more important than civil engineering for public safety as time goes on.

> Software maintenance and damage is nothing compared to real engineering.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_(spacecraft) cost $370 million when an overflow caused a rocket to explode.

I'd imagine there's some mission critical software running nuclear plants, aircraft, cars, etc.

I'll agree mission critical software exists. I however imagine there are far more engineering projects across the planets whose failure result in mass casualties than software. There is a reason actual engineers are legally liable for their work.

Yes there is. It is an older industry. One that existed when Common Law was being formed hundreds of years ago.

What about the defense industry? People die if you screw up. I mean, people die if you don't, too, but you know what I mean.

That may be true of web development, but certainly isn't of software as a whole: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

I disagree with the web development comment. What if there was a web interface on top of Therac-25 that had an error in it?

Real engineering projects every day use software—I don't think you can realistically draw a line between the two, even if there are different auditing standards.