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Comment by patrick451 | Hacker News Reader

  > - No one will die
  > - Not saving lives

Tell me you write throwaway CRUD apps without telling me you write throwaway CRUD apps. If your code touches the real world, human lives are often quite literally in your hands. This idea that you can just chill out, yeat some code into prod and head to happy hour will get people killed or seriously injured.

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I mean, percentage wise it's likely the majority of jobs in software engineering are in fields where people won't get killed if things go wrong. Very few people die because a website goes down, a video game or desktop program has bugs in it, or most businesses lose a bit of money/have downtime.

Yes there are definitely fields where people could be killed if things go wrong, perhaps in software for cars, planes, spacecraft or medical devices. Or for dangerous fields like logging or mining, or the military.

But I suspect the ratio of people working on software that's mostly/entirely harmless compared to software that has lives on the line is probably like 80:20.

FYI this list wasn’t “everyone said every one of these things.”

Also, the “only real devs touch the real world” attitude is pretty sad. Not everyone wants to write guidance systems or heart monitoring firmware.

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