How often do skyscrapers fall over, or bridges collapse

When skyscrapers fall or bridges collapse, the negligent engineers who knowingly signed off on them go to jail. When was the last time a software developer or manager went to jail over a known bug?

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vlovich123 11 hours ago | parent [-]

People going to jail for such failures are actually quite rarer than you imply. And generally software bugs rarely cause similar damage either in lives or money lost.

	▲	NamTaf 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		A better comparison to software bugs is, say, early fatigue cracking in a structure that requires retrofits to fix. Regardless, the simple fact is that software just matters less in almost every case, so no one gets held accountable. It lets the culture of unaccountability breed within IT / software eng, and here we are.
	▲	tarsierscripter 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		None of that invalidates my point. Civil Engineers (the ones building bridges and skyscrapers) have a culture of institutional accountability. They are certified members of a professional organization and when they sign off on a project, they do so by affixing their personal seal to it. This is their binding endorsement of the soundness of the architectural drawings. The presence of that seal can be used as evidence in court against them (criminal or civil). It’s also possible for engineers to be stripped of their seal by the organization for failures far less severe than a bridge collapsing, such as conflicts of interest. There isn’t anything like that in software, even though the stakes are much lower. Far more common is a total disclaimer of warranty whatsoever.