alt Hacker NewsA long time ago we decided as a society that in order for an engineer to sign off on physical designs, they have to take legal liability for them.
No such process exists for a model to take a design seriously that can kill people.
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user43928 • yesterday at 6:19 PM
With a larger project, I do not think there is a requirement that the engineer signing off understands every implementation detail.
I imagine that the requirement is that after testing, you are confident that the product is safe.
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For serious engineering work not only physical designs, software also.
When we manually tested nuclear power plant controlling software, each test case was printed out on paper and tested and then signed by the tester. A lot of paper was produced and archived for each software release. (Archived for as long as the software was running in any nuclear power plant).
Everyone understood, that in a case of significant accident at the nuclear power plant, accident analysis would be done and if the root cause was an software error, this could have possible legal consequences for the developers and testers. (Of course nuclear power plants have many independent and redundant hardware controlling mechanisms, but incorrectly working controlling software could damage the power plant in a very costly way).