> I'd never be in a meeting regarding deaths of users of my software
I know what that's like.
About 20 years ago I was at a consulting firm supporting an electric and gas utility company. Among other things they had to do something called "markouts" which means they paint the ground at a location in a way that indicates exactly what infrastructure they have in the ground and precisely where it is. Markouts are a government organized thing. Before digging somewhere you can call a number and anybody that might possibly have infrastructure in the ground anywhere near your dig site is required to paint their markouts within a short time period. There are stiff fines if you "miss a markout."
Anyhow there was a data problem with a markout. The field worker was sent to paint a markout at the corner of two streets that actually ran parallel to each other and didn't meet. Instead of calling it in and questioning the task he did nothing. Shortly after a construction worker put a backhoe through an electrical conduit with 15K volts. There was an explosion that was heard for many miles. The worker died the next day. He died painfully.
> so I just cannot help but be curious as to how one of those meetings would go.
Finger pointing, of course. Data was being fed back and forth between systems and eventually somebody else took the blame. The field worker who ignored the markout also was blamed. We did add something to our system so that that kind of data error would raise an exception.
I learned a lot about care and diligence about data from this experience. Data errors are no joke.
