In the vast majority of sane engineering orgs there isn’t gross negligence and developers are very cautious (hence the popular evil PM / incompetent manager trope) to the point that they barely move at all.
In the vast majority of sane engineering orgs there isn’t gross negligence and developers are very cautious (hence the popular evil PM / incompetent manager trope) to the point that they barely move at all.
No, but is most software work really engineering? Personally, and atthe risk of completely going off topic and starting a debate which has little purpose, I don't think so. I don't consider duct taping together various frameworks and third party libs to create yet-another-CRUD-app "engineering".
Software development has different constraints. An edit -> compile -> test cycle is free, but formal verification of code is obscure and unwieldy. Consequently, our best practices are more iterative and empirical than front-loaded and model-driven. But we do have some. (Not denying that software engineering is much less mature than other forms).
A team that's doing good high-cohesion low-coupling components, fault tolerant design, unit testing, integration testing, version control, code review, capacity planning, telemetry, staging, canaries, blue/green or incremental rollout, feature flags, etc. is acting in accordance with the body of knowledge called "software engineering" even if they're doing it for a boring CRUD app. Someone with a big pile of spaghetti code on his laptop is probably not doing software engineering, even if he's cracked P=NP. (He might be doing computer science - have you seen how researchers code?)
Are there safety concerns that a lot of engineering doesn't have? Sure. But it goes both ways. In her field of engineering there are limited impactees and mistakes while potentially fatal have minimum monetary value. I can fuck up and cost my company millions in an instant. Or expose millions of user's personal information. Different risks, and I'd still probably take the a stolen identity over death, but at the end of the day it's a similar job.