Hardware fails because of physical rules, software is more abstract and more flexible. I agree that higher standards should be required, but business people won't do it as it will make it as slow as hardware engineering. I'd love to see formal verification for at least the business core of any application. That should incentivize product managers to write better specifications.
The electrical grid is typically 230/120 Volts AC at 50/60 Hz. A bad design will rely on that and fail once something about that is out of whack in either direction. A good design will gracefully shutdown, or operate normally within reasonable thresholds.
You can apply the same principle to programming (in fact, many programmers do). If your program falls completely fall and explode into pieces once any peripheral, call, timing, or whatever isn't as expected, then it isn't a resilient program. If it fails in unexpected ways while still writing data you might even have a dangerous program.
So many programmers are happy with writing a program that works. That would be as if a car manufacturer would be happy to call it a day if the car manages to accelerate.
