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Comment by andrewflnr | Hacker News Reader

But as you've made clear, the root of the problem is not with the engineer.

Personally I think a corporate death penalty strikes a nice balance of holding companies and individuals responsible. If a company exercises sufficient malfeasance, it gets nationalized with no compensation for shareholders. Watch the incentives align real fast.

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Yeah that sounds great! A company guillotine is absolutely something I could get behind. Problem is I don't think there's any way it could possibly happen politically. Whereas we have a really strong existence proof for e.g. the Professional Engineer certification and other professional coherence mechanisms. That seems to work, albeit not without its own inefficiencies. I doubt anyone, though, would advocate for some kind of laissez-faire situation where the profit incentive aligns with the regulatory one. Historically that hasn't gone well. A lot of people died.

PEs are demonstrably a partial solution at best. Fields with certified engineers still have financially motivated disasters (boeing goes the door plug).

For better or worse, I think we'll see more political support for increased oversight of companies on the next free decades. I only hope it manifests in a useful way instead of a self-defeating way.

It'll have to be pretty much all the ways. One way will stick. The rest will be forgotten failures.

I'm afraid this is a situation where the first halfway plausible solution will "stick" and sap the pressure to change even if it doesn't do a good job.

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