I would argue that review boards, licensing, etc are only relevant because of the stakes. How to enforce it becomes irrelevant if you can't sell anybody on the idea that it's important in the first place.
Even the strength of your statement "...I don't think it would hurt the industry to have..." doesn't sound like something that any part of government would be willing to get behind.
There's just such a huge leap from "decisions civil engineers make can kill. people" to "decisions software engineers make can annoy people".
Still, you're not wrong that the field might immediately get better in some ways, but I believe we could also go down a lot of paths that would lead to the widespread concept of "stifling innovation so that people are less likely to be annoyed by buggy or hard to use software". I'm sure there are also much stronger arguments in favor of your idea of a better world when you narrow the scope down to specific types of software or use cases.
I would argue that review boards, licensing, etc are only relevant because of the stakes. How to enforce it becomes irrelevant if you can't sell anybody on the idea that it's important in the first place.
Even the strength of your statement "...I don't think it would hurt the industry to have..." doesn't sound like something that any part of government would be willing to get behind.
There's just such a huge leap from "decisions civil engineers make can kill. people" to "decisions software engineers make can annoy people".
Still, you're not wrong that the field might immediately get better in some ways, but I believe we could also go down a lot of paths that would lead to the widespread concept of "stifling innovation so that people are less likely to be annoyed by buggy or hard to use software". I'm sure there are also much stronger arguments in favor of your idea of a better world when you narrow the scope down to specific types of software or use cases.