> So wouldn't you agree that in a sense, the stakes for programming is much higher?
That doesn't mean the stakes are higher. It means the potential upsides are higher.
The potential downsides are also much lower (a bad website will rarely kill someone).
The combination of these two incentivize bringing in as many people as possible, even if standards suffer because there's almost no downside (civilizationally speaking, companies do occasionally lose quite a bit of money).
That's probably true although I think eventually, that kind of callous line of thinking might actually get someone indirectly killed because programmers don't worry about the impact of their code.
A less severe (although in my opinion still live changing) problem is having an unusual name making it harder to book flights. Another example where having a NULL license plate got someone thousands of tickets [1]. Or IP addresses getting mapped to locations where they actually don't come from and now someone's house is getting searched because "their IP had illicit activity".
Coding probably won't kill someone but I still don't think it's low stakes.
That doesn't mean the stakes are higher. It means the potential upsides are higher.
The potential downsides are also much lower (a bad website will rarely kill someone).
The combination of these two incentivize bringing in as many people as possible, even if standards suffer because there's almost no downside (civilizationally speaking, companies do occasionally lose quite a bit of money).