[necovek]

But that's a great example of why we might not need to turn into professionally licensed experts: the risk of messing the implementation of GDPR up is nowhere near messing a bridge or even a single family home up.

Now sure, with software controlling everything today (even the tools an engineer would use to design and build a bridge: imagine a bug in software setting the cement ratio in concrete being used), there are accountability reasons to do it.

[OkayPhysicist]

Sure, we programmers aren't likely to kill anyone with malpractice (in most software development disciplines, anyway). But we have a much, much broader impact. An exceptionally bad bridge collapse kills maybe a couple hundred people. Incompetent or malicious coding practices on a site negatively effect millions, with some sites getting up to the billions.

[necovek]

No disagreement there, but opportunity costs are present and unregulated everywhere: eg. a bad traffic light design (timings) might increase congestion and greenhouse gasses emissions 10×, but nobody is losing their traffic engineering license for that.