I think many engineers would highly benefit from doing a 1-2 year stint working on safety-critical embedded software, where there are correctness requirements, and lives are lost if you're wrong or careless. It may not be everyone's bowl of soup, but it would at least expose you to that side of the world and you might learn something from the experience. Perhaps if everyone did this kind of tour of duty, something would rub off, and there would not be so much casual yolo carelessness in the "normal" software world.
Anecdotally, working on mission-critical always-on systems when I was a junior developer was influential on the development of good habits when writing code that have carried through in contexts where such code quality was not required. In my view I benefited greatly from this exposure early in my career.
A lot of it is pretty basic: checking every single return code, testing every single branch, verifying that the external environment is doing what it claims or should be doing. All of this is muscle memory now, I find it difficult to write a throwaway python script without doing this. I also don’t feel like the degree of thoroughness I put into it significantly slows down development either compared to other developers that YOLO it a bit more; I spend a bit more time writing it, they spend a bit more time debugging it in test. And in prod, the former approach has lower defect rates.
It doesn’t need to be safety critical embedded software, which has a somewhat niche set of problems. Even fairly high-level data infrastructure has many of these same challenges.
I'm not averse to working on safety critical stuff in a vacuum but if they expect me to do safety critical stuff at the same pace I do my very non-safety critical stuff I'm going to expect a significant salary premium, probably at least 1.5x up from what I'm making currently. I need to charge more if I'm going to be directly responsible for the loss of lives, because sooner or later I'm going to start losing sleep over it.
From my experience in the industry, if the average backend dev went to work in that industry, the average level of competence would go up (compare the average salary, for one thing). The processes are all about making it hard to fuck up really badly, they're very much not going to weed out 'careless' devs, just limit the damage they can do.
I don't think "careless" is a permanent, intrinsic attribute of a developer. It's something they learn to be, and it can be unlearned.
We respond to incentives. If a developer's only incentive is "we reward shipping as fast as possible" then they will carelessly ship slop as fast as they can type it. If that incentive is removed, they can learn a better way...
