People’s freedom jeopardised by new software adopted by California’s courts

Not at all. Do you want a rapist getting out of jail earlier? That would be troubling.

I wish I could upvote this a hundred times. I am currently dealing with an Indian dev shop and the code has been atrocious -- as if they didn't even read the requirement. Doing a very basic Stripe integration has taken nearly a week and it was still incorrect. I could provide days of examples.

> professional standards bodies grew alongside the maturing industry > ensure that people working in the industry where adequately trained and adequately protected from external factors > software and the people who write that software I think at some point we need to start looking at a similar system

Who this gets implemented I'll quit and become a welder or something else that's outdoors and filled with less insane propositions. The BS and stupidity that gets setup by these standards organizations is crazy.

I know many people who are PEs who can testify that all of this is completely useless. It's often said by people who give these certifications that you shouldn't go into industry before getting these. That's acceptable until you hear why: you'll forget a lot of stuff that is unused in industry but used in these exams. This is horrible design at it's best.

"Engineering Standardization" in this form is good for a few things:

   1. Driving up the cost by keeping perfectly good engineers out of the field and making the industry talent starved.
   2. Creating a corrupt standardization organization that makes it so their "group" can get certificates while others cant.
   3. A reduction to the speed of new ideas entering the field. Less people allowed in all of which are brainwashed into "THIS IS THE WAY, YOU WILL OBEY" 
   4. A lack of care for checking work; "They're a professional engineer, you know better then me"
   5. Preserving irrelevant information that isn't at all related to the task at hand (A+, I'm looking at you)

I think the real solution is for universities to actually teach people how to program, about software architecture, about software engineering, about maintenance, and less about things that you won't necessarily be doing. I'm in senior level classes at college and I find that most of my peers have problem "doing programming" and I know people in the EE track who have problems "doing electronics". These aren't stupid people, they are just lacking instruction needed to succeed in the field.

Another solution is to have a simple standard: All life endangering software must either be a) formally proven by the programmers and checked by a mathematician or b) have unit testing for every possible case of every testable portion of the code.

If both of these are done then it will save far more lives then useless standards that will be actively ignored. These two standards are already where our field is naturally going and embracing that will only yield higher quality software for everyone. Using stupid standards documents that specify things like "functions can only be 80 chars wide and 100 lines long" or "no memory allocation after startup"

It also avoids forming unnatural accreditation bodies that are harmful to the industry.

Edit: I'd also be perfectly fine with something like UL for software.

>Don't put the blame on the developers. Too frequently they are put under huge pressure and cannot say "no" to their managers.

Befehl ist Befehl. Blaming management is literally the Nuremberg defence. If we feel that we have to do reckless and dangerous things in order to keep our jobs, then we desperately need to unionise. It's just not good enough for us to throw up our hands and blame the PHBs.

Management need to change, but they're not going to do it voluntarily. Pressure needs to come from users, but also from developers. We need to fight back against poor practices, as millions of workers have done in other industries. We're the guys on the shop floor, we're the people who know what the issues are and how to fix them. If we don't take a stand, nobody else will.

How would we react if this story was about a plane crash or a nuclear accident caused by negligence? Would we be so quick to absolve employees of responsibility, or would we be asking why nobody blew the whistle?

> Too frequently they are put under huge pressure and cannot say "no" to their managers.

Actually, this is precisely why something like the "Iron Ring", linked above, exists. Standards bodies like APEGA (https://www.apega.ca) exist precisely so that you have someone backing you if you say "no" to a manager. If you're an engineer and you put the public at harm in any way, APEGA will come after you. Part of being able to call yourself an engineer in Canada is the distinction that specifically you won't just say "yes" and bend over because your manager wills it. Your duty is first and foremost to the public.

This is something that works incredibly well for engineering, geology, and geoscientists, and I can't see why it won't work for software. Developers who are contracted to build systems for the public like this absolutely _should_ have liability here.