Aviation and elevators both run on software written by professioanl programmers so I'm not sure that comic makes a good point.

The problem with voting is that it's a distributed systems problem that requires coordination between not just many computers but people that cannot be controlled by code. An elevator can operate as a self-contained system without coordination with other systems. That's why it can be reliable while websites and apps cannot.

> Our entire field is bad at what we do.

Our entire field is bad at what we do, because it's full of coders instead of engineers.

Think about it. Building airplanes reliably has been figured out by aircraft engineers, building elevators safely has been figured out by building engineers, and building software reliably has been figured out by software _engineers_ (the NASA kind, who landed a spacecraft on the moon).

However, this isn't the experience you have on your regular job. "Oh, oops, everything failed because I forgot to do X". Can you imagine if the moon lander crashed because some guy forgot to do that manual thing he's always supposed to do? Of course you can't imagine, because they put actual engineers in charge of that, not coders.