alt Hacker NewsProfessional engineers are required to consider the interests of the public in their work, have an obligation to reject unethical or harmful instructions and are regulated by their professional organization to support competency and address malpractice. Much of this was driven over the past 50-100 years as society determined that they wanted things built by engineers to not kill people or have material deficiencies following construction.
From my understanding, software engineers are a long away out from this still but perhaps we'll get there once the dust settles on more of these sorts of lawsuits.
Replies
There's no need to have software engineering be regulated. It'd be a restriction/deterrent at the wrong level.
In order to fix this we need the individuals in charge to be held legally accountable without hiding behind a corporation.
In the software industry management rarely ever listens to concerns brought up by engineering even if it's technical concerns.
The dust will never settle because once people try to regulate they can basically move software engineering in its whole somewhere else. Something great about being active in multiple places is the fact that these companies have leverage. There's not just a cost advantage to having amazon in luxembourg, just employ a few thousands (10 000 jobs are linked to amazon in luxembourg) and you can block votes in europe (because of veto power). 10K jobs is nothing for amazon but is 2% of all jobs in luxembourg.
Same way amazon being big in india isn't just great because of the vast talent pool and 'low' costs in India (even if many if most indian programmers are subpar, they got over a billion people), they basically ensure that the government in India can never turn against Amazon, because these jobs are concentrated in a specific region and India isn't a unified state. Amazon can try many getting into many different things in India without having the risk associated some small foreign company breaking into India would have.