Civil litigation basically means that the taxpayers are on the hook for any damages. I am betting if there were to be personal responsibility, these types are acts would be history.
Computer programmers aren't authorized and licensed by the government to inflict violence like police officers. Computer programmers are not licensed by the government to prescribe dangerous medications or perform surgeries.
Also, if you aren't working as an engineer for another company but are self employed, it's not a bad idea to get some form of errors and omissions insurance, which is comparable to the malpractice insurance doctors get.
In al critical systems they are just one part of a chain and all their work has to be verified/validated by at least a few additional actors.
A policeman can just decide to randomly murder someone (and often face no repercussions). While a construction worker or a software developer can cause significant harm as well they almost never have near complete autonomy.
As a developer I don't have the power to stop these bad decisions. I just have to stew in them. Holding me responsible for the bad code that gets written to kludge past the bad decisions.
Better I suppose than the company that had me build a rails app to move millions of records an hour, hosted on their personal windows laptop. (yeah rails on windows)
What’s wrong with Tailwind CSS?
That's like saying the cleaning crew at the local police station have ruined plenty of lives due to police brutality.
It has nothing to do programmers and everything to do with Post Office’s management. If they bought buggy software they had years to seek recourse for that.
Front end web dev? Nah, who gives a shit. Embedded system that's fail deadly? Um, yes.
More likely that a frayed power cord (or one of a thousand other things) on your laptop will catch fire while you're on the client premise, causing thousands in damages, or that same laptop has some sort of trojan/virus that you spread through the client network, and you're on the hook for remediation.
IME, most of the time that's why an independent consultant needs business insurance. The quality of the work is generally handled by the contract.
But YMMV.
There is liability / duty of care / grounds to sue for negligence only when the injury / damages were directly related to the nature of the business, not when there is an incidental freak accident which happens to occur on the premise.
What does front end dev work have to do with the statistical random chance that wires somewhere in the building are frayed?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palsgraf_v._Long_Island_Railro....
As I mentioned it could be a thousand different things that might trigger such liability.
I'm not telling you (or anyone else) what to do.
That said, I'm sure legal fees, if they become necessary, would be much less than insurance premiums. /s
[0] https://www.insureon.com/blog/common-consulting-business-ins...
Police force is the largest expense for local governments, doubling or tripping the costs seems like an unwise and inefficient thing to do for a society
Requiring officer-named insurance would create immediate pressure to weed out bad behavior and prevent bad cops from being re-hired one county over.
https://abc7ny.com/police-training-new-jersey-street-cop-atl...
There's a similar case unfolding in Massachusetts as well. And Google "killology" if you really want to be disgusted.
It's precisely because of the importance of policing that we don't want the people responsible for oversight and discipline of the police to have a "solid working relationship with faith and trust running both ways" -- there needs to be an arm's length relationship, with the watchdogs incentivized to monitor for wrongdoing, and the police somewhat afraid of being called out by them, certainly not buddy-buddy with them.