Hey all

I have seen some extraordinarily bad things in my time. Very early on, I was involved in a court case, where my system held data from medical devices which showed a person had HIV. This person wanted to prove us wrong and collect money for defamation IIRC. After an in-depth audit, it was shown that we properly logged the data. Whew. A few things I've seen make me wonder - at what point does a programmer's lack of ability actually constitute negligence? Does a public variable in a system which tracks the current "patient" and when changed blends two patient's treatments and loses the first patient's treatments? Those patients would have died. Does inventory being out over a million dollars? Are we not supposed to be professionals? Why do I see code that looks like the equivalent of a BMW on the outside - but under the hood looks like spit and duct-tape powered by a hamster?