alt Hacker NewsOther fields of engineering usually have a regulated licensure, upon which they can call themselves a Professional Engineer. This gives them the ability to make final approval/sign-off on designs and technical reports. It's most common in civil engineering, where a PE license is required for all publicly funded projects (and most privately funded ones as well, due to local/regional/national regulations) to be approved.
This license requires the holder to uphold code of professional ethics, and makes the engineer themselves be personally responsible for the safety and viability of the design itself. Losing a PE license is rare, but it does happen. The industry board (usually a regional board) can also discipline/reprimand engineers who fail to meet the professional standard - rubber stamping projects, personal misconduct, etc. Losing a license is a huge deal, but even reprimands can have a serious negative impact on someone's career.
In the industry the previous commenter works in their hypothetical would absolutely meet the bar for discipline or reprimand.
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The problem with software is that software doesn't care about where it's built. Jurisdictions need to balance safety and quality regulation with the fact that you can just make the software somewhere where the regulations aren't so onerous, and most software is made very far from the place where it is used.
If you're making a bridge usable by residents of Springfield, that bridge has to be in Springfield, and it has to be made by Springfield engineers following Springfield laws.
It goes beyond engineering. An account just out of university isn't allowed to sign off on anything, only after a next step can they co-sign, and they need yet another step to be the primary signer.
Depending on the country, there's also a level you need to attain as lawyer to argue in higher courts.
The incentive structure you're describing is also a major contributor to cost disease.
Every decision to increase the cost of a product is taking that money out of the customer's pocket which they then can't use to buy more nutritious food or medicine or make rent and avoid becoming homeless. Every additional tax dollar spent on inflating the cost of an infrastructure project is one that can't be spent on cancer research or Pell grants or catching pedos. Moreover, that type of "tax" is highly regressive because when you make e.g. housing cost more, only the poor become unable to afford it.
Meanwhile the system you're referring to gives the engineers the incentive to be excessively risk-averse. Give someone the authority to command that resources be allocated to something and liability for not allocating them but no liability for what happens to the people the resources were allocated from and the result is not an optimal system.