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When Engineers Become Whistleblowers

273 points by furcyd 7y ago

rmbryan 7y ago
... by Ralph Nader “the [engineering] profession must assert itself towards its most magnificent aspirations—for so much of our future is in your trust.”
MaupitiBlue 7y ago
Is anyone else surprised that there have been no whistleblower leaks wrt the 737 Max and MCAS? Are we left to conclude that there really weren’t any engineers who thought putting in a system like MCAS, giving it authority to override the pilots, making it dependent on a single AOA sensor, not testing the system under a sensor failure, and not telling pilots or carriers about said system was a really bad idea. Yet we’re 6+ months out, and we’ve heard nothing other than the AOA disagree light issue.
- djhaskin987 7y ago
  The article refers to Boeing and the whistleblowers from that company involved in disclosing problems with the 738 MAX, so apparently there were leaks.
- e40 7y ago
  It's unclear. There was a podcast I listened to recently that featured several Boeing whistleblowers, but they focused on the 787 not the 737. Just because we haven't heard about them doesn't mean they don't exist. Whistleblowers don't necessarily contact the media, they might just be contacting the FAA. And, the FAA, in the case of the previously mentioned 787 whistleblowers, did not take any real action against Boeing. I can try and dig up the podcast if anyone is interested.
- rectang 7y ago
  With two planes down and hundreds of people dead, all the ugly stuff is coming out now, regardless. It's not necessary for a whistleblower to step out and sacrifice their life to bring us that information. And I'm skeptical whether there was ever enough certainty with regards to the deadliness of MCAS which could have justified a whistleblower level of personal sacrifice. It's easy for me to believe that people thought it would be good enough, or that at least that no one felt sure that it would fail. We should treat whistleblowers better, but our safety and regulatory regimes should be designed to function without them.
  - bumby 7y ago
    I think you hit a good point. I'm fairly confident that most engineers/people will make the call if it's a clear-cut case of "this will inevitably lead to catastrophe" But in the real-world, everything is shrouded in a level of uncertainty. For most bad scenarios, people are really good at rationalizing why it's not going to happen. Unfortunately, it seems the level of rationalization is directly proportional to their incentives against admitting that bad outcome is a real possibility.
  - specialist 7y ago
    "...our safety and regulatory regimes should be designed to function without them" As I understand it, subverting the oversight regimes, allowing Boeing to sign off on their own work, is a big part of this story. I was a SQA Manager for a while. Every writer needs an editor. It blows my mind that we still believe people can catch their own mistakes. Source: My neighbor and bestie was a Boeing lifer, mostly working in QC/QA. I get to hear all about this stuff.
- boomlinde 7y ago
  https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boeing-737-max-8-at-least-4-potential-whistleblower-calls-made-to-faa-about-jetliner/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boeing-737-max-8-at-least-4-pot...
- Roark66 7y ago
  I am surprised, but at the same time I'm aware that unfortunately there is an endemic lack of taking responsibility in many modern engineering professions. Software engineering being one of them. I often see by myself and read about other cases elsewhere of examples of badly designed and written software being put in place due to short shortsightedly perceived financial goals of doing so. I bet that every software engineer encountered such software in their career. Were the engineers that created it incompetent? Perhaps, but more likely is that they were put under pressure to deliver such flawed solutions, and people who said no were replaced with those that said yes no matter what. I recently watched a documentary about death penalty and how states couldn't get doctors to design the lethal injection because none would agree to work on it. I envy that doctors can have such integrity, but as a group we engineers have very little when money is involved.
  - ryandrake 7y ago
    > Perhaps, but more likely is that they were put under pressure to deliver such flawed solutions, and people who said no were replaced with those that said yes no matter what. Early in my career I asked to not work on a project on ethical grounds, and my manager said “fine, Ted is fine with doing it, so I’ll assign you to a different project!” Years later I actually quit a job partially over objection to some less than ethical uses of the technology, and the boss never even broke a sweat. There were lines of developers out the door willing to replace me. Software engineering talent is effectively unlimited because we have no professional organization that caps supply, like doctors have. This leads to all kinds of races-to-the-bottom.
    - AstralStorm 7y ago
      Until you get to the top of the accredited safety critical software developers. The cream of the crop. Note there is a supply limiter in the form of accreditation and another of typically requiring years of experience too.
  - bsder 7y ago
    > I am surprised, but at the same time I'm aware that unfortunately there is an endemic lack of taking responsibility in many modern engineering professions. Software engineering being one of them. There is no such thing as "Software Engineer". You can't get a Professional Engineering license for it, nor can you be sued for not adhering to standards. The National Society for Professional Engineers (NSPE) was screaming for years that software people should not be allowed to call themselves engineers. They lost that battle, and here we are with your comment. And the all the resulting issues that the NSPE predicted. > I recently watched a documentary about death penalty and how states couldn't get doctors to design the lethal injection because none would agree to work on it. I envy that doctors can have such integrity, but as a group we engineers have very little when money is involved. This has nothing to do with integrity and everything to do with the fact that you could lose your medical license. You would have to offer a doctor enough money to cover the rest of their career, and states are notoriously cheap.
- Kiro 7y ago
  From the article you're replying to: "Indeed, in the aftermath of recent Boeing 737 MAX crashes, the media routinely and positively refers to disclosures by “Boeing whistleblowers.”"
- afterburner 7y ago
  The article states: > Indeed, in the aftermath of recent Boeing 737 MAX crashes, the media routinely and positively refers to disclosures by “Boeing whistleblowers.” So, I guess there are some whistleblowers?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- manfredo 7y ago
  Was there any actual malicious or reckless intent behind these events? From what I gathered, there were a whole chain of bad decisions: * Moving the engines higher and forward and keeping the same aircraft designation. * Patching this design change over with software to push forward on the yoke at high AOA. * Failing to account for AOA sensor failure. * A bad trim-resetting logic that let MCAS exert almost total authority over the elevators. * Poor pilot training on these new features All these things came together to make planes fall out of the sky, I'm not sure if there was any one individual that had the whole picture in their mind.
VengefulCynic 7y ago
Within the financial services industry, there are significant monetary incentives for whistleblowers to come forward with evidence of malfeasance. The SEC offers something like 0.5% of recovered funds, which can amount to millions of dollars... which is important because even with the protections afforded by Dodd-Frank, it's a very real possibility that you won't work in the finance industry again. By contrast, while it might not be a permanent career-ending event for an engineer to blow the whistle at an engineering company, it holds the significant risk of ending the engineer's career at that company. Not to mention lawsuits and the cost of finding a new job. Most every engineer I know wants to do the right thing... but those are powerful headwinds. So on the mere suspicion of misfeasance or malfeasance, the prospect of losing a job and being embroiled in a lawsuit serves as a powerful deterrent. People will point out (correctly) that adding financial incentives will inevitably lead to a combination of malicious compliance and misreporting, so there's a line that has to be drawn. Also, protections in private sector are either toothless or come with expensive oversight, but it's clear that if the government wants more whistleblowing from the ranks of normal engineers (and that's a big 'if'), they probably need to do something more to cause it to happen besides just keep asking.
- snarf21 7y ago
  Agree completely. Companies will do whatever it takes to drive sales and revenue and stock price. Employees don't want to raise their hand and get fired as they have families to support. A true whistleblower program with WITSEC level provisions for protection and monetary support would help cut this down. Once it happens once or twice companies are very disincentivized to continue down this road.
- emilecantin 7y ago
  This is the point of having Professional Engineers and a very strict deontological code; it tips the incentive scale towards doing the right thing. When asked to do something unethical, the P.E. has a choice: they can refuse, in which case they might lose their job; or they can comply, in which case they might lose their license altogether (and thus their job).
  - 7y ago
bluetomcat 7y ago
An engineer likes to model the world in terms of systems with interconnected moving parts, but rarely accounts for the irrational human political factor. What may be fraudulent or inefficient to an engineer may be a "necessary evil" to a policy maker, in order to satisfy the group interest of a company or nation. Making things 100% efficient and transparent seems like a dystopia with a central world government and no pluralism whatsoever.
- nathanvanfleet 7y ago
  Wait so corruption and cover ups is your utopia in this scenario? Companies committing crimes that are never uncovered so they can hold onto power and make just a little more money?
  - bluetomcat 7y ago
    It is essentially tribalism in a very refined form. Each group wants a larger portion of the pie and in order to get it, often finds unethical but legal ways of doing so. Only by raising the general awareness level of the whole population, we can refine tribalism even more by refining the legal and social frameworks.
    - AstralStorm 7y ago
      As it is, those frameworks are controlled by political tribalism, enabled by the fact that general voters think tribal. Chicken and egg problem in its shell.
  - closetohome 7y ago
    And a 100% transparent and efficient government would create a dystopia. Apparently.
- nitwit005 7y ago
  The system requires people who aren't Engineers to take action. Engineers aren't writing or enforcing the law. The world view of engineers isn't particularly important, except to cause them to report something.
ocschwar 7y ago
A big problem is that it takes whistle blowers in the first place. This is why we have PE certification: so that projects with safety implications can't go forward if engineers are silent, instead of letting silence imply consent.
- throwayEngineer 7y ago
  You think the PE test stops corruption? Lol no. If anything it limits the pool of people that can speak up. I passed the PE, but that has nothing to do with ethics and responsibility. In the end, it's up to the human. Edit, passed the FE, but that's the hard one.
  - jldugger 7y ago
    No, but PE's have to sign off on designs. They have to speak in _favor_ of a project and design, and that's presumed to be a mildly higher bar for the marginal ethical dilemma.
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    > Edit, passed the FE, but that's the hard one. Unless something has changed since I got my Bachelor's, the FE is the easy one (at least if you take it near graduation).
  - the_jeremy 7y ago
    Also took the FE, very much disagree that it's the hard one.
  - coupdejarnac 7y ago
    In my state, each year we're required to take a 1 hour ethics class. Sure, that doesn't stop you from doing something unethical. If you get caught, you're either going to have to pay a large fine or change careers. Or go to jail. Edit: Also, around half the people who take the PE exam fail it. I took the computer engineering exam and breezed through it. If someone failed the same exam I took, I would have serious doubts about their ability to do engineering.
  - 7y ago
quotemstr 7y ago
It's important to clarify that "whistleblowing" should apply only to conduct that's outright illegal or that's morally repugnant to almost everyone. Over and over again of late, I've seen plain old politically-motivated leaking motivated as "whistleblowing". No, activist, you don't get to advance a political agenda by hijacking the word "whistleblowing" and applying it to your attempt to pressure the company via the press into enacting your preferred policy.
elliekelly 7y ago
Engineering whistleblowers are so interesting to me because systemic fraud often requires management to "segregate" the duties across teams to conceal the true nature of what's going on which makes it difficult for any one person to pick up on. But the typical engineer, unlike the typical medical billing specialist or accountant, for example, has a tendency to keep asking "why" when things don't make sense. It makes me wonder whether there's something engineering whistleblowers might be able to teach their less technical peers in other industries.
- fwip 7y ago
  I'm not sure you know many accountants if you think they don't like drilling deep.
  - elliekelly 7y ago
    I am one. I've managed teams of them. And I've worked at a big 4 accounting firm. Accountants look for evidence that supports management's claims. They do not ask "why."
    - haggy 7y ago
      I feel like your statement is incredibly broad. You don't think accountants ever ask "why"? In all your time as an account and manager of accountants, you've never had someone come to you asking about something that seemed weird to them?
      - elliekelly 7y ago
        Of course people have asked about things that seem weird. I'm not saying accountants never use the word "why." I'm saying that's not their role. The function of a public accountant is to gather enough evidence to be reasonably assured of management's assertions. That's it. They aren't investigating the company, they aren't looking for fraud (though sometimes they find it), and they aren't looking to poke holes in the story they've been told. They're looking to confirm it. If you think about the type of person who tends to become an accountant they're usually more of the box-checking/completionist type rather than the model-building/creative problem-solver type that become engineers. For the most part that's a good thing.
salawat 7y ago
The aviation industry is actually pretty notorious for tight lippedness given that it's a sector that has higher than normal cross-section with National Security concerns. A lot of information that has come out has likely been lead to by the fact there are people who can tell others where to look, and what questions to ask who aren't bound by any sort of an NDA, or any concerns of getting blackballed by the industry. That's my guess anyway. A little bit of knowledge, speaking the lingo, and an independent perspective goes a long way toward piercing through the veil of institutional secrecy. The truly arcane is very infrequently the root cause of a severe problem in my experience. Almost every high severity problem results from the seed of problems endemic to the culture that has been architected in a workplace. If you have a culture that discourages costly non-value adds (and is daft enough to consider Quality/Safety Assurance a non-value add), you're going to have blind spots that will come back to haunt you. Engineers may not find it a naturally comfortable course of action to speak up and hold people accountable, right down to requiring a manager to deliver to you a signed piece of paper swearing that X or Y will not happen because reasons, and it is the decision of <insert manager's name here> that this path of inquiry is not productive enough to follow, for you to then pin your rebuttal to and send up formal chains of authorization; creating that dastardly paper trail that makes everyone squirm. I don't even pull that one out unless it is something particularly egregious, and at that it would usually only be after getting the ball rolling to bring about a culture change to undo the myopia that has clearly set in already to allow things to degenerate to that point. Nobody wants to be the bad guy, or think they are working for the bad guy, which makes it d difficult at times to assume the mantle of That Guy, but that's where your people who really do Quality thrive. It doesn't make you super popular or get you invited to fancy parties, but if you stick to it, you'll become one of the most positive forces for change wherever you are. Until you run into the Liar up the chain of command of course. Then the politics commence, and victory/positive outcomes are not guaranteed. And Quality people seldom have golden parachutes.
- bumby 7y ago
  I think it's important to institute a formal method to document these decisions. Too often there's a diffusion of responsibility/accountability. If there are specific processes being deviated from, they get documented along with the associated risks/mitigation and the approach gets accepted by the appropriate authority. If there's risk-documenting process in place, nobody has to feel like a bad guy for forcing someone to put their name on the dotted line. In my experience, this tends to force people to really think about the risks they are taking and, at the very least, make a more informed decision. Of course, this requires requirements to be there in the first place to deviate from; it requires a managed process. For example, if Boeing categorized MCAS software as 'critical' they may have a process that says any critical software requires redundant inputs. If a business decision was made to avoid redundant inputs on base models, a manager should be signing off on this documenting the associated deviation/risks and why they are acceptable. Woe be the manager who signs off saying they will accept a risk of a plane crash to up-sell a redundant sensor.
appleflaxen 7y ago
A related concept (and tool for whistleblowers) is the qui tam lawsuit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qui_tam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qui_tam
temp1029 7y ago
I wonder if anyone would actually choose to work somewhere if they thought that one possible outcome was to be a whistleblower to that company and make out with $X?
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fareesh 7y ago
James O'Keefe had a few former Twitter engineers caught on camera talking about "unwritten rules" and shadowbans for certain points of view. Sadly given his record, he could film an actual alien invasion and people wouldn't believe it until the planet was destroyed. Probably doesn't meet the standard for whistleblowing though, since it's just censorship by a private company.
- quacked 7y ago
  Ever since the his piece on ACORN, I have no respect for that guy.
  - viggity 7y ago
    i'm not saying the guy has never done some shady shit (hello, wire tapping a senator?). But what was wrong with the ACORN videos. That seemed pretty cut and dry.
    - fareesh 7y ago
      I think the story is that the people recorded in the video called the police right after O'Keefe left.
datavirtue 7y ago
Anonymous public feedback. You need whistle lowers because things are happening in the dark without a way for the truth to bubble up.
tareqak 7y ago
I know my suggestion would be an inappropriate use of protected class, but why don't whistleblowers get that level of protection? If a society wants to put ethics at the forefront of its leadership, then ethical people need to be able to continue working in their careers to progress further as opposed to being pushed out for doing what society wants them to do. If a society doesn't want whistleblowers, then it shouldn't reward them and it should even consider penalizing them. The prevailing sentiment about whistleblowers and whistleblowing seems ambiguous and akin to a sort of NIH: people are alright with having whistleblower in places anywhere except for their own organization.
theuttick 7y ago
I worked on the space program for a few years. Massive fraud that was carried out with an audacity that would make Boss Hogg blush. When I initially complained, my boss told me that NASA was "a middle class welfare program" and that I shouldn't take it so seriously. Eventually, I reached a point where I just couldn't sign off on purchasing equipment for testing an item that simply didn't exist. I was working 60 hours a week for low pay doing the work that had been reported to have been done years beforehand and just couldn't do it any more. After taking two systems from months/years behind schedule to months ahead, I was fired. No discussion, no debate, no warnings, no notifications. They lied to the Texas Workforce commission and said that I was warned and got caught. TWC refused to do anything about it. NASA inspector general found that everything that I said was true, but that me being fired was not something they would handle. There is no wrongful termination in Texas. A decade later, the project(s) I was working on at the time was finally moved from the contractor to government funded equipment - meaning the government was going to have to do what the contractors were originally paid to do. No one cares.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

273 points by furcyd 7y ago

... by Ralph Nader “the [engineering] profession must assert itself towards its most magnificent aspirations—for so much of our future is in your trust.”

MaupitiBlue 7y ago

Is anyone else surprised that there have been no whistleblower leaks wrt the 737 Max and MCAS? Are we left to conclude that there really weren’t any engineers who thought putting in a system like MCAS, giving it authority to override the pilots, making it dependent on a single AOA sensor, not testing the system under a sensor failure, and not telling pilots or carriers about said system was a really bad idea. Yet we’re 6+ months out, and we’ve heard nothing other than the AOA disagree light issue.

djhaskin987 7y ago
The article refers to Boeing and the whistleblowers from that company involved in disclosing problems with the 738 MAX, so apparently there were leaks.
e40 7y ago
It's unclear. There was a podcast I listened to recently that featured several Boeing whistleblowers, but they focused on the 787 not the 737. Just because we haven't heard about them doesn't mean they don't exist. Whistleblowers don't necessarily contact the media, they might just be contacting the FAA. And, the FAA, in the case of the previously mentioned 787 whistleblowers, did not take any real action against Boeing. I can try and dig up the podcast if anyone is interested.
rectang 7y ago
With two planes down and hundreds of people dead, all the ugly stuff is coming out now, regardless. It's not necessary for a whistleblower to step out and sacrifice their life to bring us that information. And I'm skeptical whether there was ever enough certainty with regards to the deadliness of MCAS which could have justified a whistleblower level of personal sacrifice. It's easy for me to believe that people thought it would be good enough, or that at least that no one felt sure that it would fail. We should treat whistleblowers better, but our safety and regulatory regimes should be designed to function without them.
- bumby 7y ago
  I think you hit a good point. I'm fairly confident that most engineers/people will make the call if it's a clear-cut case of "this will inevitably lead to catastrophe" But in the real-world, everything is shrouded in a level of uncertainty. For most bad scenarios, people are really good at rationalizing why it's not going to happen. Unfortunately, it seems the level of rationalization is directly proportional to their incentives against admitting that bad outcome is a real possibility.
- specialist 7y ago
  "...our safety and regulatory regimes should be designed to function without them" As I understand it, subverting the oversight regimes, allowing Boeing to sign off on their own work, is a big part of this story. I was a SQA Manager for a while. Every writer needs an editor. It blows my mind that we still believe people can catch their own mistakes. Source: My neighbor and bestie was a Boeing lifer, mostly working in QC/QA. I get to hear all about this stuff.
boomlinde 7y ago
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boeing-737-max-8-at-least-4-potential-whistleblower-calls-made-to-faa-about-jetliner/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boeing-737-max-8-at-least-4-pot...
Roark66 7y ago
I am surprised, but at the same time I'm aware that unfortunately there is an endemic lack of taking responsibility in many modern engineering professions. Software engineering being one of them. I often see by myself and read about other cases elsewhere of examples of badly designed and written software being put in place due to short shortsightedly perceived financial goals of doing so. I bet that every software engineer encountered such software in their career. Were the engineers that created it incompetent? Perhaps, but more likely is that they were put under pressure to deliver such flawed solutions, and people who said no were replaced with those that said yes no matter what. I recently watched a documentary about death penalty and how states couldn't get doctors to design the lethal injection because none would agree to work on it. I envy that doctors can have such integrity, but as a group we engineers have very little when money is involved.
- ryandrake 7y ago
  > Perhaps, but more likely is that they were put under pressure to deliver such flawed solutions, and people who said no were replaced with those that said yes no matter what. Early in my career I asked to not work on a project on ethical grounds, and my manager said “fine, Ted is fine with doing it, so I’ll assign you to a different project!” Years later I actually quit a job partially over objection to some less than ethical uses of the technology, and the boss never even broke a sweat. There were lines of developers out the door willing to replace me. Software engineering talent is effectively unlimited because we have no professional organization that caps supply, like doctors have. This leads to all kinds of races-to-the-bottom.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Until you get to the top of the accredited safety critical software developers. The cream of the crop. Note there is a supply limiter in the form of accreditation and another of typically requiring years of experience too.
- bsder 7y ago
  > I am surprised, but at the same time I'm aware that unfortunately there is an endemic lack of taking responsibility in many modern engineering professions. Software engineering being one of them. There is no such thing as "Software Engineer". You can't get a Professional Engineering license for it, nor can you be sued for not adhering to standards. The National Society for Professional Engineers (NSPE) was screaming for years that software people should not be allowed to call themselves engineers. They lost that battle, and here we are with your comment. And the all the resulting issues that the NSPE predicted. > I recently watched a documentary about death penalty and how states couldn't get doctors to design the lethal injection because none would agree to work on it. I envy that doctors can have such integrity, but as a group we engineers have very little when money is involved. This has nothing to do with integrity and everything to do with the fact that you could lose your medical license. You would have to offer a doctor enough money to cover the rest of their career, and states are notoriously cheap.
Kiro 7y ago
From the article you're replying to: "Indeed, in the aftermath of recent Boeing 737 MAX crashes, the media routinely and positively refers to disclosures by “Boeing whistleblowers.”"
afterburner 7y ago
The article states: > Indeed, in the aftermath of recent Boeing 737 MAX crashes, the media routinely and positively refers to disclosures by “Boeing whistleblowers.” So, I guess there are some whistleblowers?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
manfredo 7y ago
Was there any actual malicious or reckless intent behind these events? From what I gathered, there were a whole chain of bad decisions: * Moving the engines higher and forward and keeping the same aircraft designation. * Patching this design change over with software to push forward on the yoke at high AOA. * Failing to account for AOA sensor failure. * A bad trim-resetting logic that let MCAS exert almost total authority over the elevators. * Poor pilot training on these new features All these things came together to make planes fall out of the sky, I'm not sure if there was any one individual that had the whole picture in their mind.

VengefulCynic 7y ago

Within the financial services industry, there are significant monetary incentives for whistleblowers to come forward with evidence of malfeasance. The SEC offers something like 0.5% of recovered funds, which can amount to millions of dollars... which is important because even with the protections afforded by Dodd-Frank, it's a very real possibility that you won't work in the finance industry again. By contrast, while it might not be a permanent career-ending event for an engineer to blow the whistle at an engineering company, it holds the significant risk of ending the engineer's career at that company. Not to mention lawsuits and the cost of finding a new job. Most every engineer I know wants to do the right thing... but those are powerful headwinds. So on the mere suspicion of misfeasance or malfeasance, the prospect of losing a job and being embroiled in a lawsuit serves as a powerful deterrent. People will point out (correctly) that adding financial incentives will inevitably lead to a combination of malicious compliance and misreporting, so there's a line that has to be drawn. Also, protections in private sector are either toothless or come with expensive oversight, but it's clear that if the government wants more whistleblowing from the ranks of normal engineers (and that's a big 'if'), they probably need to do something more to cause it to happen besides just keep asking.

snarf21 7y ago
Agree completely. Companies will do whatever it takes to drive sales and revenue and stock price. Employees don't want to raise their hand and get fired as they have families to support. A true whistleblower program with WITSEC level provisions for protection and monetary support would help cut this down. Once it happens once or twice companies are very disincentivized to continue down this road.
emilecantin 7y ago
This is the point of having Professional Engineers and a very strict deontological code; it tips the incentive scale towards doing the right thing. When asked to do something unethical, the P.E. has a choice: they can refuse, in which case they might lose their job; or they can comply, in which case they might lose their license altogether (and thus their job).
- 7y ago

bluetomcat 7y ago

An engineer likes to model the world in terms of systems with interconnected moving parts, but rarely accounts for the irrational human political factor. What may be fraudulent or inefficient to an engineer may be a "necessary evil" to a policy maker, in order to satisfy the group interest of a company or nation. Making things 100% efficient and transparent seems like a dystopia with a central world government and no pluralism whatsoever.

nathanvanfleet 7y ago
Wait so corruption and cover ups is your utopia in this scenario? Companies committing crimes that are never uncovered so they can hold onto power and make just a little more money?
- bluetomcat 7y ago
  It is essentially tribalism in a very refined form. Each group wants a larger portion of the pie and in order to get it, often finds unethical but legal ways of doing so. Only by raising the general awareness level of the whole population, we can refine tribalism even more by refining the legal and social frameworks.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    As it is, those frameworks are controlled by political tribalism, enabled by the fact that general voters think tribal. Chicken and egg problem in its shell.
- closetohome 7y ago
  And a 100% transparent and efficient government would create a dystopia. Apparently.
nitwit005 7y ago
The system requires people who aren't Engineers to take action. Engineers aren't writing or enforcing the law. The world view of engineers isn't particularly important, except to cause them to report something.

ocschwar 7y ago

A big problem is that it takes whistle blowers in the first place. This is why we have PE certification: so that projects with safety implications can't go forward if engineers are silent, instead of letting silence imply consent.

throwayEngineer 7y ago
You think the PE test stops corruption? Lol no. If anything it limits the pool of people that can speak up. I passed the PE, but that has nothing to do with ethics and responsibility. In the end, it's up to the human. Edit, passed the FE, but that's the hard one.
- jldugger 7y ago
  No, but PE's have to sign off on designs. They have to speak in _favor_ of a project and design, and that's presumed to be a mildly higher bar for the marginal ethical dilemma.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  > Edit, passed the FE, but that's the hard one. Unless something has changed since I got my Bachelor's, the FE is the easy one (at least if you take it near graduation).
- the_jeremy 7y ago
  Also took the FE, very much disagree that it's the hard one.
- coupdejarnac 7y ago
  In my state, each year we're required to take a 1 hour ethics class. Sure, that doesn't stop you from doing something unethical. If you get caught, you're either going to have to pay a large fine or change careers. Or go to jail. Edit: Also, around half the people who take the PE exam fail it. I took the computer engineering exam and breezed through it. If someone failed the same exam I took, I would have serious doubts about their ability to do engineering.
- 7y ago

quotemstr 7y ago

It's important to clarify that "whistleblowing" should apply only to conduct that's outright illegal or that's morally repugnant to almost everyone. Over and over again of late, I've seen plain old politically-motivated leaking motivated as "whistleblowing". No, activist, you don't get to advance a political agenda by hijacking the word "whistleblowing" and applying it to your attempt to pressure the company via the press into enacting your preferred policy.

elliekelly 7y ago

Engineering whistleblowers are so interesting to me because systemic fraud often requires management to "segregate" the duties across teams to conceal the true nature of what's going on which makes it difficult for any one person to pick up on. But the typical engineer, unlike the typical medical billing specialist or accountant, for example, has a tendency to keep asking "why" when things don't make sense. It makes me wonder whether there's something engineering whistleblowers might be able to teach their less technical peers in other industries.

fwip 7y ago
I'm not sure you know many accountants if you think they don't like drilling deep.
- elliekelly 7y ago
  I am one. I've managed teams of them. And I've worked at a big 4 accounting firm. Accountants look for evidence that supports management's claims. They do not ask "why."
  - haggy 7y ago
    I feel like your statement is incredibly broad. You don't think accountants ever ask "why"? In all your time as an account and manager of accountants, you've never had someone come to you asking about something that seemed weird to them?
    - elliekelly 7y ago
      Of course people have asked about things that seem weird. I'm not saying accountants never use the word "why." I'm saying that's not their role. The function of a public accountant is to gather enough evidence to be reasonably assured of management's assertions. That's it. They aren't investigating the company, they aren't looking for fraud (though sometimes they find it), and they aren't looking to poke holes in the story they've been told. They're looking to confirm it. If you think about the type of person who tends to become an accountant they're usually more of the box-checking/completionist type rather than the model-building/creative problem-solver type that become engineers. For the most part that's a good thing.

salawat 7y ago

The aviation industry is actually pretty notorious for tight lippedness given that it's a sector that has higher than normal cross-section with National Security concerns. A lot of information that has come out has likely been lead to by the fact there are people who can tell others where to look, and what questions to ask who aren't bound by any sort of an NDA, or any concerns of getting blackballed by the industry. That's my guess anyway. A little bit of knowledge, speaking the lingo, and an independent perspective goes a long way toward piercing through the veil of institutional secrecy. The truly arcane is very infrequently the root cause of a severe problem in my experience. Almost every high severity problem results from the seed of problems endemic to the culture that has been architected in a workplace. If you have a culture that discourages costly non-value adds (and is daft enough to consider Quality/Safety Assurance a non-value add), you're going to have blind spots that will come back to haunt you. Engineers may not find it a naturally comfortable course of action to speak up and hold people accountable, right down to requiring a manager to deliver to you a signed piece of paper swearing that X or Y will not happen because reasons, and it is the decision of <insert manager's name here> that this path of inquiry is not productive enough to follow, for you to then pin your rebuttal to and send up formal chains of authorization; creating that dastardly paper trail that makes everyone squirm. I don't even pull that one out unless it is something particularly egregious, and at that it would usually only be after getting the ball rolling to bring about a culture change to undo the myopia that has clearly set in already to allow things to degenerate to that point. Nobody wants to be the bad guy, or think they are working for the bad guy, which makes it d difficult at times to assume the mantle of That Guy, but that's where your people who really do Quality thrive. It doesn't make you super popular or get you invited to fancy parties, but if you stick to it, you'll become one of the most positive forces for change wherever you are. Until you run into the Liar up the chain of command of course. Then the politics commence, and victory/positive outcomes are not guaranteed. And Quality people seldom have golden parachutes.

bumby 7y ago
I think it's important to institute a formal method to document these decisions. Too often there's a diffusion of responsibility/accountability. If there are specific processes being deviated from, they get documented along with the associated risks/mitigation and the approach gets accepted by the appropriate authority. If there's risk-documenting process in place, nobody has to feel like a bad guy for forcing someone to put their name on the dotted line. In my experience, this tends to force people to really think about the risks they are taking and, at the very least, make a more informed decision. Of course, this requires requirements to be there in the first place to deviate from; it requires a managed process. For example, if Boeing categorized MCAS software as 'critical' they may have a process that says any critical software requires redundant inputs. If a business decision was made to avoid redundant inputs on base models, a manager should be signing off on this documenting the associated deviation/risks and why they are acceptable. Woe be the manager who signs off saying they will accept a risk of a plane crash to up-sell a redundant sensor.

appleflaxen 7y ago

A related concept (and tool for whistleblowers) is the qui tam lawsuit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qui_tam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qui_tam

temp1029 7y ago

I wonder if anyone would actually choose to work somewhere if they thought that one possible outcome was to be a whistleblower to that company and make out with $X?

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fareesh 7y ago

James O'Keefe had a few former Twitter engineers caught on camera talking about "unwritten rules" and shadowbans for certain points of view. Sadly given his record, he could film an actual alien invasion and people wouldn't believe it until the planet was destroyed. Probably doesn't meet the standard for whistleblowing though, since it's just censorship by a private company.

quacked 7y ago
Ever since the his piece on ACORN, I have no respect for that guy.
- viggity 7y ago
  i'm not saying the guy has never done some shady shit (hello, wire tapping a senator?). But what was wrong with the ACORN videos. That seemed pretty cut and dry.
  - fareesh 7y ago
    I think the story is that the people recorded in the video called the police right after O'Keefe left.

datavirtue 7y ago

Anonymous public feedback. You need whistle lowers because things are happening in the dark without a way for the truth to bubble up.

tareqak 7y ago

I know my suggestion would be an inappropriate use of protected class, but why don't whistleblowers get that level of protection? If a society wants to put ethics at the forefront of its leadership, then ethical people need to be able to continue working in their careers to progress further as opposed to being pushed out for doing what society wants them to do. If a society doesn't want whistleblowers, then it shouldn't reward them and it should even consider penalizing them. The prevailing sentiment about whistleblowers and whistleblowing seems ambiguous and akin to a sort of NIH: people are alright with having whistleblower in places anywhere except for their own organization.

theuttick 7y ago

I worked on the space program for a few years. Massive fraud that was carried out with an audacity that would make Boss Hogg blush. When I initially complained, my boss told me that NASA was "a middle class welfare program" and that I shouldn't take it so seriously. Eventually, I reached a point where I just couldn't sign off on purchasing equipment for testing an item that simply didn't exist. I was working 60 hours a week for low pay doing the work that had been reported to have been done years beforehand and just couldn't do it any more. After taking two systems from months/years behind schedule to months ahead, I was fired. No discussion, no debate, no warnings, no notifications. They lied to the Texas Workforce commission and said that I was warned and got caught. TWC refused to do anything about it. NASA inspector general found that everything that I said was true, but that me being fired was not something they would handle. There is no wrongful termination in Texas. A decade later, the project(s) I was working on at the time was finally moved from the contractor to government funded equipment - meaning the government was going to have to do what the contractors were originally paid to do. No one cares.

deleted 7y ago

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