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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

Yes, that will happen.

Consider an analogous situation: You made a mistake designing a building. Should you be able to shrug it off as "mistakes happen"?

This has actually happened in the real world with buildings, and when it does if you are responsible and work diligently to correct the problem people are understanding.

Do the same here.

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I'm not saying you should shrug it off - I'm saying you should't have your life ruined over a mistake in some code you wrote.

I'm yet to see a building collapse around me in my city - I see software fail all the time though - I think we are better at building tall buildings than we are building software.

Or, it might be the exact opposite: For a building the engineer and builders are required to take personal responsibility.

Not so for software.

Perhaps if you change that software might change.

Nothing would ever get built if individual devs were held liable by the public.

The liability sits with your employer.

Sorta. The basis for your concern underlines one of the problems. When such gaffs happen in engineering, the firm is blamed. Within the firm, individual actors are blamed. In software, on the other hand, your major system might have responsibility for a critical system spread across a total of 1 persons, so he gets all the blame. Is that really okay for one hip-shooter to take this on in the first place?

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