> Pencils and paperclips break all the time. Even in areas where safety of life is an issue - popularly assumed to be the sole province of engineers - failures still occur absent any negligence on the part of engineers.

Reliability of software is not like reliability of a machine, or building.

Machines and buildings are made of matter, and so have uncontrollable variation, and wear out over time. Everything made of matter fails eventually; it's part of the engineer's job to trade off reliability and cost.

Software is made of bits. The only reason it fails (cosmic rays and other negligible intrusions of matter aside) is defects in design.

Do you really get mechanical or civil engineers saying "yeah, we expect there are a few fatal flaws in the design, that's just how it goes, we'll build it anyway and ship a fix if customers complain"? Apart from on Kickstarter, I mean.