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Comment by slipframe | Hacker News Reader

Programmers want the social respect and salaries of real engineers, without any of the professional responsibility and accountability. We [loosely speaking] want to have our cake and eat it too. I think if society continues to let us get away with it, nothing will change. Self-regulation clearly is not going to happen at this rate, we need legislatures to wake up and put our collective feet to the fire.

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There are no programmers that work on this WD product. That’s the problem. The company cut off support. Which is entirely a management decision. You can see when management values support you get secure software. How often do we find out about google drive breaches?

Though at this point I think you could argue software 'engineers' make way more than on real engineers. At least the upside is much higher. I can not think of any other job where you can have no formal education and have chance of making over 500k a year. Which makes your point even stronger.. we pay the people who design things that could kill you less and make them way more accountable. I hate being called software engineer I feel a developer is a better term.

I write software for medical devices, and where I work we take the stance that we are software engineers, not developers or programmers. The idea being that we design things that without the right failure analysis and mitigations could indeed kill people. The fact that we have an excellent track record is due to our engineering of a safe system.

Well some "real engineers" really do code, but mostly not CRUD applications. Most embedded systems, industrial control systems and avionic software are designed and crafted by electronic/electrical engineers. High performance computing number crunching is also dominated by physicists and engineers that uses that for physics simulation, particle physics studies, aerospace design, CFD - Computational Fluid Simulation, FEM - Finite Element Methods and so on.

This case of MyBook seems to be another case of vulnerability caused by C. Actually most CVE vulnerabilities happens due programming mistakes that the C language makes easier to make such as to buffer overflow, out-of-bounds array access, undefined behaviour, use-after-free and etc.

If a building collapses because its owner did not care about its repairs and structural integrity, the original architect cannot be blamed. Engineering products generally need maintenance, and that includes hardware and software.

BTW I am not that sure about respect for engineers at least where I live. Medical doctors are looked up to, yes, but engineers are considered "normal people", as are software developers.

We're still in the experimentation stage for software development. New and interesting things are created because those regulations are not in place. Civil engineers and the lake don't really get to experiment in the same way; not anymore. Things falling down and causing havok were a lot more common back when they could.

Experimenting on the general public is unethical, particularly when your experiment is framed as a consumer-ready product.

I don’t think you’ll find many programmers who “want” things like this to happen. We just want to create useful things for end users, but we are driven by business requirements - not our own desires, or codified professional standards.

I, for one, would love it if there was some way to set agreed-upon software standards with a governing body set up to audit them.

But, it’s voluntary now. You don’t see programmers making the decision to implement certain features… it’s driven by business and management.

I doubt any programmer has decided this. It's just a question of cost. And the programmers don't manage those.

Medical/military/etc software is already highly regulated. Consumer grade devices are not. Collapsing bridges or free falling elevators have much different outcomes then a hard drive being wiped. A simple offline backup would save anyone in this instance.

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