I've become a strong believer that software engineers to form a guild/professional society such that we can hold ourselves accountable.
Boss tells unlicensed employee to do something evil: employee weighs "do the right thing, and need to find a new job" vs "do the evil thing".
Boss tells a licensed employee to do something evil: employee weighs "do the right thing, and (maybe) need to find a new job" vs "do the evil thing, and maybe lose the ability to work in my field".
That's leverage to bring to your boss. "I cannot approve this, because it's evil, and approving this would get any professional stripped of their license". That puts your boss in a hot seat because now the scales are being tipped for him, worried that even if he fired you, he wouldn't be able to find anybody who would rubber stamp the evil thing.
Licenses sound good in theory but often that just means you get more "inside the box" thinking (the kind of thinking that helps on the license/guild exams), and innovation will suffer. Would we be better off if the programming industry simply used, say C, for everything since the 70s? Some things might be better, but we'd have far less and less varied of it, I'd wager.
EDIT: I assumed guilds/licenses here are mandated (which is what a guild that issues licenses often wants to do). If licenses can be ignored, it's less of an issue.
At that point I would definitely get a JD instead.
the thing is, a lot of people trust what we do and our negative impacts scale up much worse. A friend shared https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkJ4qv5RLRc with me today, and it made me enraged. Too many incompetent technologies are deployed.
True, but in those professions, the risk to the individual is typically offset by somehow enforcing labor-scarcity to drive up income for those in good-standing.
As the article itself says, the doomsaying should be taken with a grain of salt. There are problems, and the best thing to do is improve your code, and encourage your team to focus on performance, security, etc. Lead by example. Adding bureaucracy never fixed anything, and wastes so much time money and opportunity in the process.
It's gonna take more than a Jesus-type to advocate for corporate responsibility.
While you're fucking around with security fixes, you're not generating revenue. Security incidents are an assumed risk.