[skissane]

> If a civil engineer accidentally writes down one load calculation incorrectly, doesn’t follow well-known safe design practices which would’ve caught the error, and it causes the structure to collapse, they do have personal liability. Why should software engineers have special immunity?

The government regulates civil engineering, because when civil engineers screw up, people die.

The same is true for certain categories of software – aviation, motor vehicles, medical devices, etc. You can argue about whether the regulations in those areas are good enough (incidents like the 737 MAX suggest not), but those flaws are arguably best addressed by improvements in those industry-specific regulatory processes rather than trying to regulate software engineering as a whole.

With your run-of-the-mill blog hosting software or SaaS app, software bugs don't kill people. Privacy violations, financial damages yes, but actual deaths no. Anyone who wants to propose increased government regulation of software engineering – to turn software engineering into a regulated/licensed profession like civil engineering or medicine, with the kind of personal liability attached that those professions have – is going to get a lot of pushback from businesses that it is adding expense without any great benefit. And I think it is going to be hard to find anywhere enough political capital to overcome that pushback. Financial damage is insurable, and voters value their life and health far more than their privacy.