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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

As programmers, we sure have a good position in society. If someone uses our buggy code to steal credit cards, the evil criminals are blamed. If someone uses our buggy code to win infinite money from a casino, the evil users that figured out the bug are blamed. If our autopilot software decides that a pilot is trying to land an A320 when he's trying to climb and the plane crashes into a forest, the pilot goes to prison, not the programmers!

And, we get this complete autonomy and immunity without any education or certification!

With great power comes great responsibility, folks.

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I like your point, but you've drawn the wrong conclusion.

Those with power are the ones that make the rules. Programmers aren't the ones with power, it's the casinos or the plane manufacturers with power, so it's their rules as to who the losers are. If, somehow it was in the casino's best interest that the programmer was made the villain then I'm sure a reason would have been found.

Case in point Goldman Sachs screwing over Sergey Aleynikov, a programmer that served time because Goldman didn't want his expertise in a competitors company.

The Goldman issue wasn't about defects in the work product, though. If Goldman sent everyone to jail that wrote buggy code, there would be no programmers left in New York!

> If our autopilot software decides that a pilot is trying to land an A320 when he's trying to climb and the plane crashes into a forest, the pilot goes to prison, not the programmers! And, we get this complete autonomy and immunity without any education or certification!

True, but flight software itself goes through very rigorous FAA certification processes. I'd rather have that than be told that the programmers who made the software have Ph.D's!

>If our autopilot software decides that a pilot is trying to land an A320 when he's trying to climb and the plane crashes into a forest, the pilot goes to prison, not the programmers!

Prison is probably the least of the pilot's problems!

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