Why stop at bankers, lets extend this to all sorts of job titles that should be held liable for their actions (or the actions of their subordinates).
It seems engineers screw up on purpose often enough that the monetary incentives must be there.
Should we hold developers at uber criminally liable if the company fails? management? where does it stop?
Apparently not even if they design a system for thwarting regulators from doing their job.
I don't see the issue: that is part of being an Engineer: lives and livelihood of people depend on your work "working." That is how it works in all Engineering fields. Somehow in software engineering we give the title and forget the responsibility.
On the other hand, in a lot of jobs, engineers are overruled and treated as monkey typists, so...
Example: At Boeing, Engineers were overruled on 737 Max, and passengers paid the price. Time someone pays for that, in this case FAA included.
tl;dr: "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering," # Steve Jobs (note: Rubicon is VP for him)
(See https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-the-difference....)
[Edit: P.S. Some of us gave a professional oath and take it pretty seriously. We should not hold our peers to lower standards.]
It's sort of the same as the question of whether soldiers should be held responsible for wars. There wouldn't be any wars if they all refused to fight. On the other hand, they are just carrying out orders. On a third hand, why the hell is "just carrying out orders" a good excuse for killing people? Why would anyone just "carry out the orders" without thinking about it themselves? Why should we be able to outsource our ethics? These are all questions that anarchists (the serious, intellectual variety), like to ask.
For example, losing one's net worth might be an example. Shareholders are already subject to it, while for employees, even when fired, they just lose the potential of future earnings, leaving their accumulated net worth untouched.
Wikipedia calls this the principal-agent problem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble... ). Should employees in a position of power be agents that are putting up some collateral as a guarantee to be forfeit in case things go south? Or otherwise would unwarranted risk-taking behavior in their job be enough to go to jail when the results of their actions impact others in the world at large negatively?
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/26/vw-engineer-sentenced-to-40-...
And if a product fails in a significant way, you'd need to either revoke the engineer's license, or impose even more serious punishments.
Without appropriate legal structures, the best you can do is say, "No, that's a dangerous idea and I won't do it. You'd have to fire me first." Which I strongly encourage saying when appropriate. But it's not the same as a regulated industry with written best practices.
In the absence of more specific regulations, it's usually difficult to "pierce the corporate veil". The corporation itself has liability. The shareholders have limited liability. And sometimes corporate officers have personal liability for certain things.
At the same time, I don't think it makes sense to punish a junior programmer for writing buggy software. It's the corporation that should be creating processes which detect and prevent bugs.
I think rigorous building standards for certain components of software is possible, and I think we should do it, eg payments. But unlike building, I don't think all software should need to follow standards.
Politicians are mostly professional parasites and most political systems seem to attract, apart from the odd once-in-a-while genuine idealist, exactly that type of people.
I find it very hard to imagine that there is a lack of honest grass-roots idealists in a country of 350+ million people, so it must be a lack of people willing to vote for them.