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One Canadian student engineering team recently won an engineering competition by creating a cell phone tracking system for an airport. The ethics are pretend, t

One Canadian student engineering team recently won an engineering competition by creating a cell phone tracking system for an airport. The ethics are pretend, the engineering association only cares about punishing people for mistakes (at least, as I'm told by the seniors I've spoken to).

tareqak 7y ago
I graduated from a Canadian engineering undergraduate program in software engineering, and I have my Iron Ring. The ethics in the more established branches engineering (chemical, electrical, mechanical) are definitely not pretend, and are more rigorous. Software engineering is considerably newer so the codifying the ethics there are definitely a work in progress. One thing that I will say is that the engineering ethics case studies that I remember reading mostly related to duty of care to the public vs. the employer’s interests. I don’t remember an engineering ethics case study that had government or a branch of it pitted against the public good. In addition, the engineering association is less inclined to protect ethical engineers after they’ve done the right thing as opposed to going after unethical engineers after they’ve been caught. On this issue, I personally think they have work to do, but the organization might consider that sort of action outside their mandate.
- jammygit 7y ago
  I suspect you’re far more informed than I am. I should not have spoken of engineering so broadly, I think what I said may have been very software specific
  - tareqak 7y ago
    No problem. A lot more Canadian engineering undergraduates find the whole Iron Ring and ethics stuff to be some kind of Koolaid than I'd like to admit. I am interested in learning more about that team that won a prize for the cellphone-tracking solution at airports though: specifically, I'm curious as to how they came across the problem and how said problem was framed. Framing is one of the tools in which entities get people to build surveillance tools like PRISM and the like by appealing to those people's sense of patriotism. The other big tool is money, and enough of it.

tareqak 7y ago

I graduated from a Canadian engineering undergraduate program in software engineering, and I have my Iron Ring. The ethics in the more established branches engineering (chemical, electrical, mechanical) are definitely not pretend, and are more rigorous. Software engineering is considerably newer so the codifying the ethics there are definitely a work in progress. One thing that I will say is that the engineering ethics case studies that I remember reading mostly related to duty of care to the public vs. the employer’s interests. I don’t remember an engineering ethics case study that had government or a branch of it pitted against the public good. In addition, the engineering association is less inclined to protect ethical engineers after they’ve done the right thing as opposed to going after unethical engineers after they’ve been caught. On this issue, I personally think they have work to do, but the organization might consider that sort of action outside their mandate.

jammygit 7y ago
I suspect you’re far more informed than I am. I should not have spoken of engineering so broadly, I think what I said may have been very software specific
- tareqak 7y ago
  No problem. A lot more Canadian engineering undergraduates find the whole Iron Ring and ethics stuff to be some kind of Koolaid than I'd like to admit. I am interested in learning more about that team that won a prize for the cellphone-tracking solution at airports though: specifically, I'm curious as to how they came across the problem and how said problem was framed. Framing is one of the tools in which entities get people to build surveillance tools like PRISM and the like by appealing to those people's sense of patriotism. The other big tool is money, and enough of it.