How do other fields where the workers are liable for damages like this work? What do architects who sign off on buildings do for example?
I don't believe they all ask for incredible amounts of compensation
I don't believe they all ask for incredible amounts of compensation
Also, the software world doesn't have the benefit of millennia of accumulated best practices.
Finally, the senior engineers and architects who are licensed to sign off on things they will be held criminally liable for do get incredible amounts of compensation as compared to their more junior colleagues.
On the other hand, a minor screwup in software is far more likely to cause catastrophic failure because we just don't know how to workably build large, robust systems out of code.
Nit: meeting the requirements of law isn't barely collapsing; that requirement has so many safety factors built-in because the building code has to approximate so much. The approach isn't that dissimilar from how that "anybody" you mention would build their bridge that doesn't fall down: by guessing safely.
Effectively, they test things to destruction, then publish minimum requirements. So if you want to pressurise your reactor vessel to reactor vessel to 30 atmospheres, you can pretty much look up a table that'll tell you precisely how thick the reactor walls need to be for each of the commonly used materials. If you want to use something uncommon, then you need to pay somebody to test it.
If it fails in a catastrophic fashion, you can expect to be asked to show that you did your due diligence, and there are extenuating circumstances a reasonable engineer could not have been expected to foresee and plan for. Or that you did foresee it, and somebody else chose to accept the (clearly defined) risk.