Nothing drive the point home than emotional pain. Of course, if it can be avoided, do learn from those who made mistakes, but sometime the best teacher is doing it yourself.
I’m also pretty sure that students in civil engineering are making virtual bridges collapse every single day.
It’s also true in other engineering branches : we have barely the same planes design since decades and that’s for good reason.
It’s not really something you can do when rules and best practices are going left and right every couple of months.
And don’t get me wrong I’m convinced that the peak of program engineering is in the past. But the industry keep forcing new things to developers.
Meanwhile in programming you will literally have someone hash their passwords using md5 in 2023.
Maybe the difference is liability and possibly ending up in jail when things break. Software error has become a common excuse these days. If your companies enourmous unethical fuckup is exposed, just blame it on software error. Everybody understands: software errors happen and there is nothing we can do to prevent them from happening.
Only this is not true. We know how to test code. We know about formally verified code. In safety critical domains (aviation, automotive, industrial, banking, ...) we have been doing this forever.
I am not saying that every garden shed should have to follow the same rules as an interstate bridge, but maybe if our webservices fail spectacularly on a regular fashion maybe we should look towards software engineering practises that prevent things from failing that often?
¹ After that most bridge collapses have been due to organisational failures, like a lack of maintenance or a lack of oversight or enforcement of the established rules
By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest;
Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the
bitterest.