In a perfect world the creation of software would have been locked down like other engineering fields, with developers and companies suffering legal consequences for exposing customer information.
Were going in circles far too fast to have licensure that hinges on being up to date.
A doctor kills a patient because malpractice. Could that patient have died anyway if the patient had a more critical condition?
That is a non sequitur argument.
> Would they still be liable in your perfect world?
Yes. The doctor would be liable because did not meet the minimum quality criteria. In the same way that the developer is liable for not taking into account any risks and providing a deeply flawed product.
It is impossible in practice to protect software from all possible attacks as there are attackers with very deep pockets. That does not mean that all security should be scrapped.
Your spouse dies in surgery. The highly experienced surgeon made a mistake, because, realistically, everyone makes mistakes sometimes.
Your spouse dies in surgery. The hospital handed a passing five year old a scalpel to see what would happen.
There's a clear difference; neither are _great_, but someone's probably going to jail for the second one.
In real, regulated professions, no-one's expecting absolute perfection, but you're not allowed to be negligent. Of course, 'software engineer' is (generally) _not_ a real, regulated profession. And vibe-coding idiot 'founder' certainly isn't.
What happened is a perfect natural selection. The friend is a very small actor with probably a dozen customers not a multi-billion $$ company with millions of customers.
But I guess the lesson is to vibe code to test the market while factoring a real developer cost upfront and hiring one as soon as the product gets traction.
There are some industries where the massive cost of this type of lock down — probably innovation at 1/10th the speed at 100X the cost — is needed. Medicine comes to mind. It’s different from software in two ways. One is that the stakes are higher from a human point of view, but the more significant difference is that ordinary users of medicine are usually not competent to judge its efficacy (hence why there’s so much quackery). It has an extreme case of the ignorant customer problem, making it hard for the market to work. The users of software usually can see if it’s working.
Which are reasonable prices when lives are at risk.
Yes, I know RTOS are not general purpose, this is NOT apples to apples, but that is what that kind of reliability, testing, safety certification, etc. costs.
I'll say video games would certainly be worse.
I don't know if we'd be worse off with a lot of other software and/or public internet sites of 20-to-30 years ago. A lot of people are unhappy with the state of modern consumer software, ad surveillance, etc.
Probably a lot less identity theft and credit card/banking fraud.
For social media, it depends on if that "regulate things to ensure safety" attitude extends to things like abuse/threats/unsolicited gore or nudes/etc. And advertising surveillance. Would ad tracking be rejected since the device and platform should not be allowed to share all that fingerprinting stuff in the first place, or would it just be "you can track if you check all the data protection boxes" which is not really that much better.
I'm sure someone would've spent the time to produce certified Linux versions by now; "Linux with support" has been a business model for decades, and if the alternative is pay MS, pay someone else, or write your own from scratch, there's room in the market.
(Somewhere out there there's another counterfactual world where medicine is less regulated and the survivors who haven't been victimized by the resulting problems are talking about how "in that other world we'd still be getting hip replacement surgery instead of regrowing things with gene therapy" or somesuch...)
What you're really talking about when you talk about "locking down the field" is skipping or suppressing the PC revolution. That would make things like opaqueness and surveillance worse, not better. There would be nothing but SaaS and dumb terminals at the endpoint and no large base of autodidact hacker types to understand what is happening.
I have wondered if medicine wouldn't be a lot more advanced without regulation, but I tend to think no. I think we have the AB test there. There are many countries with little medical regulation (or where it is sparsely enforced) and they do not export sci-fi transhumanist medical tech. They are at best no better than what more regulated domains have. Like I said, I think many things about medicine are very different from software. They're very different industries with very different incentives, problem domain characteristics, and ethical constraints. The biggest difference, other than ethics, is that autodidactism is easy in software and almost impossible in medicine, for deep complicated practical as well as ethical reasons.
For software we do have the AB test. More conservative software markets and jurisdictions are vastly slower than less conservative ones.
Investing time building familiarity with proprietary software is already a dubious move for a lot of other reasons, but this would be just one more: why would I build curriculum around something that I'm just going to have to change next year when the new CEO does something crazy?
And as bad as it might be for many of us who hang out here, killing off proprietary software would be a great step forward.
Microsoft in the 1990s would have used the regulatory and licensure process to shut down open source. They tried to do it with bullshit lawsuits.
> legal consequences for exposing customer information.
Still a good idea. Also without taking vibe coding into account. Far too many tech companies are way too sloppy with customer data. Often intentionally so.
The EU is the only place hiring software engineers right now. Everyone in the U.S. just keeps laying them off.
Spotify is European. Any innovative SV companies going to unseat them with sheer pluckiness? Same goes for Meta or Amazon going the other way.
China and to some degree Russia have their own ecosystems due to anti-innovative barriers they put up.
You can add Korea to this list.
Even in the US most software jobs are lower-scale and lower-ROI than a company that can serve hundreds of millions of users from one central organization.
But for the engineers/investors in other countries... I think the EU, etc, would do well to put more barriers up for those companies to force the creation of local alternatives in those super-high-ROI areas - would drive a lot of high-profit job- and investment-growth which would lead to more of that SV-style risk-taking ecosystem. Just because one company is able, through technology, to now serve everyone in the world doesn't mean that it's economically ideal for most of the world.