[jszymborski]

While I agree it's overdue, I'm not sure what that event would look like.

When a bridge falls down, building collapses, patients die, people take notice.

Meanwhile, we've had the social insurance numbers and banking history of 165M+ UK, US, and Canadian people leak out of sheer technical negligence [0], and it resulted in a meek settlement and hardly broke through the public consciousness.

It seems to me that until someone dies in a way that is very clearly linked directly to a woefully negligent and under-trained software engineer messing up in a very public way, the needle is not going to budge at all.

Perhaps autonomous cars? Even then I doubt it, to be honest.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach

[accrual]

This reminded me of Therac-25 [0] wherein people died or were seriously harmed by software malfunctions in a radiation therapy machine, and standards were introduced [1] to help mitigate future incidents.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_62304

[pnathan]

I would guess it's about 20 years out, honestly. The sequential and interconnected weight & cost of software failure will have to be well beyond the capacity of conventional errors & omissions insurance to tolerate; settlements will have to be business-crashing - Knight Capital level crashing - to drive this.

Today, it's well under that.

It is, of course, long overdue; Therac25 should have really gotten the effort going, but, ce la vie with a irresponsible economy. It's plausible the EU legal systems will develop this effort first. I would not be surprised to see France or Germany fully develop the idea, probably in connection with Airbus or Siemens. Anyway. Idealism around quality....

[tda]

That has already happened too with the 737 Max fiasco...

[CamperBob2]

And nothing happens at Boeing without being signed off by PE-level engineering staff and management.

So is that the remedy people are recommending here?

[KMag]

I don't think it needs to be one major event.

If I remember history correctly, there wasn't one boiler explosion that caused us to start regulating who was allowed to design boilers. It's just that as boilers became more and more popular at the end of the 19th century, people started being maimed and killed more often, and at some point we just as a society decided enough was enough.