[duaneb]

> which costs less than the fully-loaded cost of a single billing clerk in your local municipal water department.

To be fair, a lot of maintenance value goes into the software that is never quantified. Broken software breaks hard, not partially, so maintenance is even more crucial.

[fivethree]

When a levy breaks people die. Software maintenance and damage is nothing compared to real engineering.

[petercooper]

It was never definitively proven but poorly designed software was considered to be at the heart of a helicopter crash that killed 25 people including almost all of the UK's top North Ireland intelligence experts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Scotland_RAF_Chinook_crash...

Software controls everything from nuclear power stations to missles to dams to radiation therapy machines (where, again, software killed 3 people - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25)

Proper software engineering is increasingly more important and, I'd posit, likely to become even more important than civil engineering for public safety as time goes on.

[ceejayoz]

> Software maintenance and damage is nothing compared to real engineering.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_(spacecraft) cost $370 million when an overflow caused a rocket to explode.

I'd imagine there's some mission critical software running nuclear plants, aircraft, cars, etc.

[fivethree]

I'll agree mission critical software exists. I however imagine there are far more engineering projects across the planets whose failure result in mass casualties than software. There is a reason actual engineers are legally liable for their work.

[peterboling]

Yes there is. It is an older industry. One that existed when Common Law was being formed hundreds of years ago.

[doyoulikeworms]

What about the defense industry? People die if you screw up. I mean, people die if you don't, too, but you know what I mean.

[_petronius]

That may be true of web development, but certainly isn't of software as a whole: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

[jonaldomo]

I disagree with the web development comment. What if there was a web interface on top of Therac-25 that had an error in it?

[duaneb]

Real engineering projects every day use software—I don't think you can realistically draw a line between the two, even if there are different auditing standards.