Comment by Jtsummers

Having worked in the aerospace side of software dev, I'd actually be cool with this. Outside of software, real engineers have real liability when their systems fail [1]. PEs [2] are held accountable in most countries that license engineers when they sign off on things that should not have been signed off on. Too many people on the software side, even in safety critical systems, play fast and loose with the "engineering" aspect. We know how to design sound software, we know how to analyze it, we know how to test it. Deliberate, systematic approaches to these tasks can bring orders of magnitude greater confidence in the systems we produce, we just choose not to do it. Technically, in aerospace, we have DO-178C, which provides guidelines on artefacts that need to be produced, but too often these artefacts are created after the fact, rather than prior/concurrent to the development (where they belong). Criminal liability, career ruined by loss of licensure, these are risks that might actually temper some of the recklessness in the industry.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse#... - no criminal penalties, but civil penalties and lost their license to practice.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_eng...