Developers are less likely to be directly responsible for the sort of things that surgeons are, unless you write mission-critical software. However, if you write any kind of software that a lot (millions) of people depend on, there is a very good chance that you've ruined people's lives or even caused death.
I dread to think how many people's relationships have been destroyed because the developers of Facebook, Whatsapp, Telegram et al decided to implement read notifications/"last seen" on their instant messaging apps.
There are some cases in England of post office managers going to jail because the Post Office software audit trail made it look like those managers were defrauding the post office. It turns out there might be severe bugs causing these errors
Suicide is complex and I don't want to ascribe a simplistic reason to suicide, but at least one post office manager died by suicide after a wrongful accusation.
A bungled software update left many people in the UK without access to their money for weeks. At least one person was imprisoned for that - they had to pay a fine by a certain date; they tried to pay but couldn't; even though this was totally outside their control the system wasn't flexible enough to cope.
British Gas allows some people to make weekly payments as part of a payment plan scheme. But you have to pay exactly that amount on exactly the agreed day or their software does not recognise the payment as part of the plan. EG you agree to pay £10 every Friday. On Wednesday you start by paying £20, then on Wednesday you pay £12, and you continue to pay £9 or £12 every Wednesday. You're always actually paid more than your plan agreement; and your actual balance is in credit; but you'll be getting aggressive "red" letters from British Gas telling you that you have not kept up to date with your plan and that your account is in arrears. British Gas, and I say this as politely as I can, are fucking scum.
Sadly, the RBS debacle led only to knighthoods, bail-outs and taxpayer money being spent on bonuses so they could "retain world-class talent". Apparently, firing their asses would have been a Bad Thing due to their stellar performance to date (and since).
The very idea of prison time for RBS re-cycling the Enron ideas of debt vehicles is laughable.
Enron people went to jail and the banks (like RBS) then had regulators permit exactly the same debt-swap bullshit that killed Enron. Banks went on to trade in debt - an eventual cause of the financial meltdown. RBS was a major culpable party but their chairman, Fred Goodwin, managed to get away with returning the knighthood and a fraction of his pension, while protected by a super-injunction making it illegal to reveal to the public he was a banker[1]. He continues to enjoy 'Royal Family' level police protection, has his properties removed from Street View [2] and is granted a level of establishment protection no-one else could dream of if they had been responsible for any catastrophe of even a fractional proportion.
Not long after he left RBS I was crossing a zebra crossing on George Street Edinburgh and I noticed a chap in a convertible Ferrari waiting for me to cross and I thought the driver looked rather familiar.
Took me a few moments to realise it was our very own "Fred the Shred" out for a quick spin....
> However, if you write any kind of software that a lot (millions) of people depend on, there is a very good chance that you've ruined people's lives or even caused death.
I've written code that computes performance bonuses for thousands of employees, and I'm confident that it's about 85% accurate. Took me a while to come to peace with that, since the workers my code is evaluating have a high ratio of bonus to base pay. But eh, I can only do my best.
I'm 100% confident that it's 85% accurate. The problem is that our sampling rate was too low. I can only make so many statistical interpolations before it starts to look like guesswork. Yes, management was aware of the issue. Luckily, the people whose bonuses were affected could not possibly have enough information to dispute my results. :-P
I dread to think how many people's relationships have been destroyed because the developers of Facebook, Whatsapp, Telegram et al decided to implement read notifications/"last seen" on their instant messaging apps.