[hinkley]

There’s a famous speech someone related from their civil engineering professor, where the professor basically said, if I pass you in this class I am effectively giving you a license to kill. So some of you will not be passing.

[wat10000]

My CS undergrad was in the engineering college and so I had a mandatory engineering seminar that was basically "don't get people killed with your work." We covered Challenger, Hyatt Regency, and some other classic failures. I've mostly avoided working on life-critical software so it's not an immediate concern, but that sense of responsibility still stuck with me.

[hinkley]

Also attended an engineering school. I had to take way too much chem and physics. It was weird.

I can be kind of a pain in the ass when it comes to details so I’ve worked on a couple such projects. It’s sobering, but also I think, “better me than” half a dozen corner cutters at my last two jobs. They could do much worse.

That said, I stayed on a commercial aerospace project about 14 months after I didn’t really want to be there because people kept saying the wrong things in meetings and thinking they sounded right.

[fhdbdnfnndnn]

The assumption of competency goes both ways. The NASA personnel should have been able to understand a very standard slide in their field, that any college-educated fluent English speaker would have been able to grasp.