A story referenced by digg brought up the old argument of software engineers not really being engineers. It compared them to the engineers responsible for building bridges—and not favorably as you can imagine.

A rose is a ro—segfault

So much of this is just a pride issue associated with a word, but if I were to buy into the engineer == infallible precision thing, I'd have to agree that software engineers don't meet that requirement. This is a matter of industry goals and established business patterns and any number of other things that I'm sure were stated in that article—maybe I should have read it. Nonetheless, hopefully most of us try to be precise and not allow bugs into our code. Still, I have to admit it's a rarity that a medium sized application gets out the door bug free. In fact, since the term "bug" is quite amorphous, it's pretty much an impossibility. For sure, more small applications ship with bugs than should, but unlike bridge building, product fragility is not weighed against lives. It's really a shame that quality is just another variable in the production equation. Perhaps we should be called "Software Adventurers". :)