As far as I know civil engineers can go to prison if the construction they took part in collapses - no such provision is afforded to software engineers.
(Context: I am the Head of Engineering at a bank.)
And I'm not even talking about Facebook, more about things like cloud bleed. How do you even try to regulate something like this? It's not like they intended it, but they still majorly screwed up.
This could involve going to the press, to a standards body in the country, to the government, to their union or industry representative body.
In the UK there are laws protecting whistleblowers who take actions like this.
As a PE, they can face significant legal repercussions for errors in work they approve.
The benefit to the PE is that many Civil Engineering projects are legally required to have a PE design/approve them. The PE literally has a physical stamp they use to stamp blueprints and designs when they approve it. Work won't proceed without that stamp.
So, if a PE refused to approve a bridge design, presumably it would be very difficult to find another PE who would approve it (especially given the record of the first PE rejecting the plans) and the work would not proceed.
I think that's a bit silly. The vast majority of software is trivial stuff and no real harm is caused when something goes sideways. Few of us work on safety critical systems. When a lawyer screws up it often does a lot of harm and they are also inherently bound by our legal systems. Corruption and negligence/incompetence in this area lessens the public's faith in those systems.
Lawyers and civil engineer inherently take on far greater responsibility than your average Joe Schmoe programmer writing yet another CRUD app.
Yeah I can get behind that. I work in biotech/cancer diagnostics/prognostics and we could definitely afford a higher standard, especially around the core stuff (e.g. the CV/algorithms people, but also the typical IT end of things.)
If you pass, you get a stamp, which lets you approve drawings as a certified PE.
If you believe something is not designed to adequate standards, as a PE it is on you to not put your seal on the drawings. They can't build the bridge without an engineer doing this.
If you're taking about options when some other engineer has already approved the design, I'm not sure what the best course is. Maybe bring your concerns to the engineer in question and work from there.
Or if the design is fine but a contractor is cutting corners in construction and not building to the specifications, you could potentially engineer a new design to reinforce the problems, or you could make them take it out and build it right.