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Comment by solveit | Hacker News Reader

I think software is a lot more brittle than physics. It takes a lot to go from a sturdy building to something that could collapse, whereas in software the difference could be a single line of code, or two transposed words.

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.

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Anybody can build a bridge that doesn't collapse, it takes an engineer to build bridges that barely don't collapse. This is hard work, don't downplay it.

I'm not sure how facetious you're being so I'll just play it straight. Modern buildings are not supposed to barely not collapse, they're supposed to be safe even under scenarios quite a bit more extreme than what they're expected (or even legally allowed) to handle.

They're supposed to be exactly as stable as required by law for their intended use, using the minimal amount of labor and materials so satisfy the requirements. Making them more stable using more money is easy, but getting the calculations just right requires years of training.

I see what you mean now. My point is that even if there's a minor screwup, the architect probably won't be prosecuted for anything because the building won't fail catastrophically thanks to modern standards which have substantial margins of safety built into them. It really does require criminal levels of negligence or extreme circumstances that would almost certainly save the architect from prosecution to have a building collapse on you.

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.

Point well made.

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.

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