Exactly. In order to make this work, you'd have to license "software engineers", and you'd need to pass laws requiring a signature from a licensed software engineer before shipping certain products.

And if a product fails in a significant way, you'd need to either revoke the engineer's license, or impose even more serious punishments.

Without appropriate legal structures, the best you can do is say, "No, that's a dangerous idea and I won't do it. You'd have to fire me first." Which I strongly encourage saying when appropriate. But it's not the same as a regulated industry with written best practices.

In the absence of more specific regulations, it's usually difficult to "pierce the corporate veil". The corporation itself has liability. The shareholders have limited liability. And sometimes corporate officers have personal liability for certain things.

At the same time, I don't think it makes sense to punish a junior programmer for writing buggy software. It's the corporation that should be creating processes which detect and prevent bugs.

A lawsuit against the author, the intern who +1d the PR, the senior who approved the PR, the engineer who ran the linter, the engineer who changed a variable name, the engineers who got it into prod, the engineer who fixed it (and introduced a new bug)

Uh, no? The parent was talking about software engineers, whereas this guy was closer to the hard-engineering and construction aspects, and on top of that, he was involved in wire fraud... Huge difference versus just being a smaller actor with no intent to concoct a big scheme.

That was a fraud scheme.

What are you referring to?