Exactly the attitude that would be great to stamp out: "It won't hurt/cost me, so why should I care?"
It's obviously on a far different scale from software causing deaths, I'm not trying to make comparisons between the two. But the motivation of the software developer needs to be a little more moral than just 'will I be in trouble with the law?'
What I'm saying is that if you're the kind of person that cares, you'll find a higher-paying job using that knowledge for something more important.
The kind of programmer that stores passwords in plaintext in a publicly-accessible database is not one that says, "I'm going to do this because it's faster." He or she doesn't even know that that could be a problem. Similarly, those hiring such a person are ignorant of what experience costs, and so they get what they paid for, even if they didn't make the conscious decision to make an insecure website.
(You don't see Google or Microsoft or Apple posting ads on freelancer sites for $5/hour jobs. They know the results they want cost more than that.)
"What I'm saying is that if you're the kind of person that cares, you'll find a higher-paying job using that knowledge for something more important."
It is not just a matter of developers' professional and personal integrity. We have to live with the consequences of bad software produced through the employment of amateurs, even if we, personally, care about doing a good job.
It's obviously on a far different scale from software causing deaths, I'm not trying to make comparisons between the two. But the motivation of the software developer needs to be a little more moral than just 'will I be in trouble with the law?'