Comment by ux266478
17 hours ago
I most definitely don't agree with him, and I find the idea absolutely repugnant. Devils advocate though, I would be much more careful with the code that I write if regulators passed some dogshit law like that.
17 hours ago
I most definitely don't agree with him, and I find the idea absolutely repugnant. Devils advocate though, I would be much more careful with the code that I write if regulators passed some dogshit law like that.
I would stop writing code for money.
I understand that, though I wouldn't stop. I'd just go much slower and radically change my methodology. Failures in other engineering domains come with massive legal consequences, and they have for a very long time. In mesopotamia if a house collapsed and killed someone inside, the builder was put to death. People still built houses in the hundreds of thousands.
It really just introduces a legal burden to prove competence and work in good-faith, and nets immense power to throw out ridiculous deadlines. Your managers are legally responsible too, and if they push beyond what's reasonable you have just cause to bring them to court in a way that you currently don't. To re-emphasize, I don't think this is a better world, but it's not unlivable.
Sure, but home builders today very rarely get put to death, and it takes a particular kind of intentional fuck-up to have a plumber, or a drywaller, or electrician placed in prison.
If I was personally liable for damages, and there was an insurance program or some sort - similar to how doctors & dentists practice - sure, I'd probably still write code, very carefully. But if there was a decent change of me spending the rest of my life in prison because something I wrote on a Friday at 4pm under some amount of stress? No thanks. I can re-train as a plumber, and stand knee-deep in shit all day.
Well, one scenario would be that everybody who writes code would do so for money.
Take my friend who is a property lawyer. The firm she works for buys her insurance, because it would be insane to operate without insurance, but the only available insurance is personal insurance, it insures a specific person to do property law. So, although her day job is helping that $100Bn farm equipment company buy a $10M new factory from a $100Bn construction firm, at the weekend she is covered by that same insurance when she represents her friend buying a $500k cottage. AIUI this is a completely normal arrangement.
If that was the situation for programming, the company is going to buy your $100M exploit insurance because they need a programmer, but it's personal insurance so you could work on your Game jam game using the same insurance, and it'd be crazy to just "Go commando" if you don't have employment and thus insurance, in case somehow your "Galaga but also Blue Prince and somehow a visual novel" Game jam entry causes a $10M damages payment.
Or it becomes standardized to have exclusions - pilots for example often have extensive insurance that covers the company when they’re flying for hire, but covers nothing if puttering around in a Cessna on the weekend.
Insurance companies are very, very good at figuring out how to identify and price risk, once motivated to do so.
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