My apologies for potentially hijacking this, but... this is exactly why the term "software engineer" bothers me. Yes, the software you write isn't likely to cause a shopping mall to collapse on a crowd of people, but there can be huge financial and societal responsibility here, and yet, almost every software license in existence completely disclaims that. Engineering comes with a tremendous amount of ethical and legal responsibility.
...sorry for the sarcasm but this is a message student engineers internalize in part because it is pushed by companies they want to work for but can't explain why. They don't have strong boundaries between why it might he a justifiable philosophy for Facebook but not for Boeing.
Agreed. I'm a software developer who has a degree in mechanical engineering and changed over. I cringe at calling myself an engineer in my current role.
First - architects shouldn't be lumped in with engineers in this context. It seems like there's some confusion around how far the responsibilities of an architect extend, which makes me wonder if things are different in the US? Whenever I research it seems to be the same as Australia though. Anyway, architects know as much about structural engineering as engineers know about Le Corbusier. An architect would really have to mess up to be criminally negligent.
But in response to your comment, engineers have a very clearly defined set of rules, collectively called "the code". As long as they design to them you'll be free of criminal negligence (at least during the design & development phase, things get a little murkier in construction).
More to the point, engineering for the real-world means layer upon layer of uncertainty. e.g. civil/structural engineers use materials we can't model (we use pretty-good approximations for concrete behavior) in conditions which are unknown (soil) to resist forces we can't predict (weather, earthquakes, dynamic response to loading). How does the code deal with all this uncertainty? Slap safety-factor after safety-factor onto everything. Whoever comes up with a method for more effectively dealing with this stuff will make millions.
The most obvious example being that we design structures to resist a 1-in-100 year storm. In other words, we expect a structure to be within spitting distance of failure every hundred years. But as long as you design to that standard, you're fine.
