IMHO, lots of software development resembles crafting much more than engineering and we have put so much effort into sounding smart that we are now training craftsmen that sound like scientists but are not necessarily good at their craft...

"I used the Singleton Pattern!" "Awesome, you learned about global variables!" blank stare

"All patterns are anti-patterns."

Or a factory method returning a singleton as a null object

Agree on mechanical and medical, but:

> Hobbyist wall wart vs. professional wall wart – which one should you be able to trust more not to burn your house down?

I will trust a well-known brand with lots at stake, like Apple. But on the other end of the spectrum, I would put more trust in a charger built from ground-up by a hobbyist I from my local Hackerspace than I would in a random charger off Amazon or AliExpress (and in fact, I had two no-name multi-port USB chargers from China fry themselves).

In general, I'll trust a hobbyist that cares about their craft more than someone doing it for money, unless the latter has their own skin in the game (e.g. doing a bad job would cost them real money, I can sue them, the government could put them in jail).

So with civil engineering, medical care and car manufacturing, I will trust the professionals - because there are strong legal incentives stopping them from cutting all possible corners or doing lots of nefarious things (that doesn't stop these industries from trying, though). But software is a completely different story. There's no protection, no incentives to counterbalance the sociopathy that arises when one optimizes profits too strongly. If you look at modern software, it all looks so great at the point of sale. The bad things - vendor lock-in, excessive telemetry, bad security, selling people out to advertisers, leaking the data due to bad security - all those things hurt users post-sale, and companies know that none of this meaningfully affects their profits in any way.

And even looking at the "normal" industries - at their culture - I have the impression that it's not the "for money" part that's responsible for quality, but the counterbalancing incentives; I think all these industries would be just as bad as software if it weren't for the regulation that retards the profit optimization.

I think GP’s choice of examples for electrical engineering wasn’t likely a good one, but their point generally stands for the time being. Sadly, I see electrical engineering degrading in quality as an industry in a similar fashion to the software industry has.

The risk profiles of the examples you gave are not comparable to that of most software projects. Most software projects are harmless if they crash. No one is hurt.

Software projects which do risk injury and dead, for example embedded medical, get a lot more engineering and QA.

While you are certainly right that certain fields are more deadly than others, less direct things like loosing personal pictures of someone, leaking someones unencrypted medical data, getting some abstract score wrong, etc. can seriously impact your users lifes. And even the more security critical fields constantly do things wrong. When you can change the workings of an insulin pump that is in someone elses body remotely and it turns out neither the programmer nor the regulators thought authentification might be a good idea, you know something is very wrong with a whole profession.

The latest Boeeing example is more of a regulatory failure, but somwhere someone sat and coded the behaviour that killed multiple hundreds of people.

We as programmers are just as responsible for what our stuff is doing as anybody else. Maybe even more so, because the work of our hands multiplies. If we put in the effort to make something a little easier, safer and faster that people use every day, you impact more lifes than you might know. And the same is true for the other direction.

Why is it, that software glitches are always seen as a god given higher force, that nobody could have prevented? I know managing complexity is hard, but there is proof out there that it can be done if wanted. We could wait till we are forced to do this by law, or (preferebly) develope at least a pinch of ethos for our own work.

I wouldn't bet on the industry reforming itself. If all other industries are an indication, quality and safety needs to be regulated in.

Boeing case is indeed good example. They cared about safety of their planes up until they figured out how to make more money by skillfully avoiding having to care. It looks like it blew up in their faces, but I'm not so sure of that - they're more than "too big to fail", they're a strategic company for the US, so the military won't let them fail.

> If we put in the effort to make something a little easier, safer and faster that people use every day, you impact more lifes than you might know.

My point (here and in parallel reply) is, if "being a professional" is defined as being focused on business objectives and bringing in revenue through your work, then putting in that effort, making things easier, safer and faster, are all - by that definition - unprofessional behavior. Sacrificing time and revenue for goals the market doesn't care about.