>>>>>Are we not supposed to be professionals?
>>>>
>>>>http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/10/21/1652257/most-it-workers-dont-have-stem-science-tech-engineering-math-degrees
>>>
>>>That's interesting, Al.
>>>In fact, none of the best programmers that I've worked with had math, computer science, or other technical degrees.
>>>By definition, the people who made the breakthroughs in this business could not have had much training since they were defining what the rest of us had to learn.
>>>That was certainly true of the people who trained me.
>>>The best programmer I ever hired was a 19 year old high school dropout auto mechanic who fooled around with an Atari and decided to change careers while taking some courses at night.
>>>I spent some time in the motor pool in the service, so in the interview I asked him to tell me how he'd trace a short in a lighting system. His answer was right on the money.
>>>I hired him and gave him a VFP manual and a couple of days training before starting him on small projects.
>>>Then he took off on his own and in a few months became one of the best VFP programmers I've ever seen.
>>>One of our clients paid us a nice fee in return for letting them hire him and he's now the lead programmer for one of the largest companies on Long Island.
>>>I don't think he ever did get that degree, though.
>>
>>There are lots of anecdotes like that in this business. That's what makes defining a so-called "professional" difficult.
>>
>>I find it annoying when people use the term as a bludgeon e.g. person A writes code one way, person B thinks it's better to do it a different way and calls person A "unprofessional". On a public forum like this it's tantamount to defamation. Most, if not all regulated professions have strict rules about criticizing fellow professionals.
>
>I am not calling anyone here unprofessional. I argue in favor of applying best practices and that's what I attempt to demonstrate. Seriously I have seen a piece of software built over 3 years by 5 people which I demonstrated would kill patients. Would you agree that was unprofessional?

Speaking generally, regulated professionals are not expected to be perfect, nor to have total knowledge and understanding of every facet of their profession. So, a theoretical "software professional":

- may not be aware of all of the most up-to-date "best practices"
- may write software that has bugs

So, looking at your "killer" software example, the bug could be:

- something obvious to a savvy 5th-grader
- something that arises after a farm of 30 VMs, each of which simultaneously writes 100K transactions to a VFP table backend over a stock SMB2 network, resulting in silent index corruption killing the patient
- or something in between

Every professional is expected to be "competent". Competence is usually questioned when things go wrong. Then it becomes a battle of experts - should a competent practitioner reasonably be expected to have known that best practice or found and squashed that bug? That will determine whether the practitioner is sanctioned by their professional association - in addition to any civil or criminal proceedings they may face.