> as soon as they become the cause of an outage they have invalidated their whole reason for existence

This is a bar no engineering effort has ever met. “If you ever fail, even for a moment, there’s no reason for you to even exist.”

There have been 6 fatal passenger airplane crashes in the US this year alone. NASA only built 6 shuttles and 2 of those exploded, killing their crews. And these were life-preserving systems that failed.

Discussions around software engineering quality always seem to veer into spaces where we assign almost mythic properties to other engineering efforts in an attempt to paint software engineering as lazy or careless.