|
|
|
|
|
|
by redcap
5348 days ago
|
|
|
I was thinking more of the web stuff that people do, so may be overstating my case. There are cases where you really need to make things safe - NASA's Apollo rockets and medical equipment to name a few. Also, when I talk about suing engineers I meant suing a big company such as Microsoft for the glaring security problems in earlier versions of Windows. Some Windows machines would be hacked within minutes of connecting them to the internet - in my mind that's simply negligence on the part of the developers - them being liable for creating an insecure product would force them to develop a properly secure solution - in other words to actually engineer it properly. Where you have a hardware-centric approach, I'd assume that the whole system, software included has been pretty well tested and engineered to a great deal. But banking software and I postulate most software that hacker news contributors write is probably going to be inherently flaky in some respect. The main fault for this is that writing software is so quick and easy compared to creating something physical that will last. It's due to the push to get something to market and the "easy" nature of software development that leaves true engineering discipline by the wayside. Yes, you can be in a situation (especially when people's lives depend on it directly such as medical equipment) when you are properly engineering a solution, but I still stand by my premise that most software development is not software engineering - you're just making sandcastles. |
|
|
If software developers were actually engineers, or at least some of them were and were required to sign off, they would actually have authority to influence decisions that had huge impact on this situation - deprioritizing of security, bad project management, etc, not originating from the development side of the organization.