Absolutely right, engineers know that failure is a vital part of the process. Sometimes, especially in aerospace, you have to test things to destruction to learn where the fault lines and limits lie. To paraphrase what you said about seeing program failures, if you're not producing failures in engineering, you're not trying hard enough; you haven't fully explored the "problem space".

In software engineering the philosophy has been made explicit in the current ethic that software is never finished, you can't specify everything in advance, and the best way to proceed is to just plunge ahead organically, trying things, discarding what doesn't work, and encouraging the strong (solutions) to survive. It's especially clear in software that engineering is a fundamentally Darwinian process. We manage to achieve local optima, then conditions change, just like biological evolution.

Mission Control's motto, "Failure is not an option", might sound like a contradiction of what I've just said. But what it really signifies is the recognition that things will fail, and the only acceptable response is to resolve to salvage as much of the mission as possible in the face of failure. Apollo 13 didn't succeed, but it didn't fail--the guys in the backrooms fought a rearguard action to salvage everything they could when the spacecraft failed. They gave up no success that they weren't forced to give up by the laws of an implacable universe. They never surrendered to failure, and that's what it means to say that failure is not an option.

Those are engineers.