11 ms·

Fake CV lands top 'engineer' in jail for 15 years

93 points by cwwc 2y ago

pavel_lishin 2y ago
Not a software engineer, fyi.
- buran77 2y ago
  "Engineer" in the software world is just a job title like calling yourself a "scrum ninja". It's not a protected title like "professional engineer" in the US or the equivalent in SA. The bar for the former is "I like it", the bar for the latter is usually set by law. Lying about your software engineering chops might get you fired, maybe even on the hook in a civil lawsuit. Lying about being a professional engineer while practicing engineering is usually a criminal matter. So I can't imagine lying about your software engineering chops landing you in prison even if we're talking about critical sectors like medical or aerospace.
  - fsckboy 2y ago
    >"Engineer" in the software world is just a job title like calling yourself a "scrum ninja". It's not a protected title like "professional engineer" in the US getting an engineering degree from a university requires you to study a lot of the same higher mathematics regardless of specific field, and entitles you to call yourself an engineer, even in CS. the "professional engineer" certification is a bit more vocational, indicates you've passed qualifying exams based less on intense math and more on your knowing standards for specific govt building codes, etc.
    - SkyPuncher 2y ago
      The school I went to was 80% mechanical engineers. Had they offered computer engineering, as compared to computer science, my degree would have had more overlap with physical science than virtual science (of computer engineering). It’s just not a practical degree in the US. You don’t need thermodynamics, statics, and a bunch of other physical engineering requirements to build software.
    - pavel_lishin 2y ago
      I am not aware of the US having any laws on who can call themselves Engineer or not - it's not like Canada. Having a printer and a sheet of business card blanks entitles me to call myself an engineer.
      - avhon1 2y ago
        It's legislated by individual states. A well-known example is Mats Järlström in Oregon, USA. https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-light-timing-lawsuit/ https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...
        bee_rider 2y ago
        That press release seems to be specifically about their failure to get him to stop using the term “engineer,” and the fact that the legal system recognizes a difference between it and the more protected term “professional engineer.”
      - fsckboy 2y ago
        > laws on who can call themselves Engineer or not - it's not like Canada It is like Canada in practice, depends on the terminolgoy they use. The two world's of "engineering" are so separated from each other, that's why I wrote a comment and that's why you are unaware of the distinction. You have skyscrapers in Canada, oui? If you want to change something structural on the facade (O, Canada, I mean façade) near the top of a skyscraper, like put in a balcony/observation deck, they are not going to let you do that till your plans are reviewed by a licensed engineer. Not any old engineer, only by somebody Licensed to review plans like that, who will take into account everything that needs to be taken into account, like crap falling on pedestrians walking below, 30 years from now when the concrete is starting to disintegrate. That is a licensed engineer. Canada has them. You don't know about them because you don't own a skyscraper. I know about them because I was on my condo board... in a skyscraper. they do structural, electrical, HVAC, plumbing, etc.
    - bitfilped 2y ago
      Computer Science is a science degree, not an engineering one.
    - Workaccount2 2y ago
      The core of classic engineering is learning how to work with Mother Nature OS. In software engineering you almost never have to deal with that absolute gut punch of an OS (usually at worst you just have to deal with the humans who are a product of it), and don't need to take classes to learn about it.
      - fsckboy 2y ago
        i went to a school where you can't get a CS degree without getting half of an EE degree, and vice versa, the good old EECS department there are traditions where CS came out of Math, still STEM but not generally part of the School of Engineering
    - jpambrun 2y ago
      To be a professional engineer, or just engineer really, you need to maintain your license, be in good standing with the regulatory bodyz have professional insurance, etc. The regulatory body can impose fine, mandatory training or disbar you for any ethical or technical deficiency. It's not a one time certification as you seem to believe.
  - bschmidt1 2y ago
    Despite being called an "engineer" a lot in recent years, it always feels icky because of what you just said here about it being a protected title in other industries. Not quite imposter syndrome - just feels like the wrong word for our job. It at least leaves out the linguistic/creative aspect of programming, and the execution/quality aspect of putting it all together. It's more like digital construction: Programming is more like the construction project, and less like the AutoCAD "design" piece that engineers work on. The AutoCAD piece has more in common with product design than programming. If anything, designers should be "engineers" and "eng. directors", and programmers should be "technicians" and "technical directors". They engineer products, with deliverables being design documents. And the techs implement it with the deliverable being the technology itself.
    - TremendousJudge 2y ago
      I use the title because it's what the piece of paper my university gave me when I graduated says. "Programming" is a portion of my job, alongside reviewing other people's work, design, and sitting around in meetings with people who don't have technical knowledge. Any mechanical, electrical, civil, etc, engineer will have a similar experience in many cases, except replace "programming" with something related to their area
      - crawfishphase 2y ago
        professional engineer license is required in addition to graduating and other prerequisites to be called "professional engineer" tho, no? school alone is not enough to be designated a "professional engineer", right?
        mlhpdx 2y ago
        And with respect to professional engineers there is this obscure little tidbit[1]. There is nothing of the sort in software as far as I know. [1] https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics/engineers-creed https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics/engineers-...
    - 2y ago
  - BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
    I completely agree, but we need some kind of title to differentiate the people who are as versed in CS and pragmatic programming - from the lowest asm/C to Lisps and MLs - and the typical JavaScript dev who did a web course. At least here, both are called (software) developers and I really don't want to be painted with the same brush as web cowboys who don't value stability and things done "properly".
m3kw9 2y ago
Fraud lands…
- Terr_ 2y ago
  True, I myself could whip up a a dozen fake CVs/resumes right now with no jail risk whatsoever, the real crime is fraud and the CV was just an implementation detail.
bhouston 2y ago
This is more than just a fake resume. He claimed to be an engineer, which is a profession with real formal qualifications, because there are real consequences (e.g. buildings falling down, bridges collapsing, people dying.)
- alephnerd 2y ago
  He also forged qualifications and references. The case is also linked to the larger system of patronage and state capture that existed under Zuma, where if you paid the right people who back then were in the ANC, plenty of doors would open up. Cyril Ramaphosa began a cleanup of the ANC, but it's still a work in progress AND Zuma and his patronage network have created their own party that is undercutting the ANC's vote share (at least the private sector forced the ANC-DA-IFP coalition). It's a stunning reversal for a country that 15 years ago was on track to become a developed country. South Africa in the late 2000s to 2011 was at the same distance from becoming a World Bank High Income country that Serbia and China are at today in the late 2010s and early 2020s, and South African companies like Naspers (Reddit, Tencent, VK, StackOverflow, Udemy, OLX), MTN Group (major telco player in MENA), ShopRite (major retailer across Africa which is basically a Walmart or Lidl-lite), and Vodacom (major telco and formerly satellite player in MENA and Asia) were on track to becoming major players globally.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    "Zuma and his patronage network have created their own party that is undercutting the ANC's vote share." At least they are in the opposition now and not in government. If they stayed within ANC, they would have much more influence.
    - Der_Einzige 2y ago
      And don’t forget that there’s always the threat of the EFF Nazbols and their red shirts…
- loceng 2y ago
  What if he outsourced his work to actual engineers?..
ihsw 2y ago
[dead]
drbig 2y ago
Railway engineering... 15 years career, which tells quite a lot about a lot of things, generally nothing good. Best aspect is it doesn't seem anyone got physically hurt in "the process of career progression". Quite scary.
PaywallBuster 2y ago
> earning an annual salary of about 2.8m rand ($156,000; £119,000). > he had forged a job offer letter from a German company, which encouraged Prasa to increase his salary > He was also at the forefront of a 600m rand deal to buy dozens of new trains from Spain, but they could not be used in South Africa
- masfuerte 2y ago
  Spanish trains don't fit in Spanish tunnels either! https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/02/21/unspeakable-botch-spain-spends-258-million-on-trains-that-are-too-big-for-its-tunnels https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/02/21/unspeakable-botch... (The manufacturer actually warned that they were the wrong trains and the Spanish state rail company ignored them.)
- randerson 2y ago
  600m rand is about $34 million. If "dozens" means at least 24 trains, that seems... surprisingly cheap per train, especially for government spending?
  - PaywallBuster 2y ago
    > The thirteen Afro 4000 diesel locomotives that have so far been delivered to Prasa are worth R600 million and form part of a larger R3.5 billion order for 70 new locomotives. https://groundup.org.za/article/spain-investigates-the-too-tall-trains-sale-while-south-africa-takes-no-action/ https://groundup.org.za/article/spain-investigates-the-too-t... https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/92966/new-report-shows-how-prasa-tried-to-lower-the-afro-4000-locomotives/ https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/92966/new-report-... I think most commonly they'll use dozens for any number larger than 12, not specifically a multiple of it
observationist 2y ago
Looks like he ordered trains that were too tall, risking issues with tunnels, turn engineering, derailment, etc, and got caught by people who actually did know the engineering and science involved. Some things require credentials because it's evidence that the person knows what questions to ask, what to look for, and how to plan within the constraints of their domain of expertise. This guy could probably do a great job supporting a person or team that had the right training, but his ignorance was risky, regardless of his intentions. I've seen the flip side, too, where PhDs have given awful people license to behave badly, inflicting their "expertise" on people as if it made up for the lack of diligence and follow-through, leaving destroyed companies and people in their wake. Gotta have the work ethic and the training - the institutions behind formal engineering disciplines do a great job of ensuring they qualify the people who will put in the work and know what they're doing.
- api 2y ago
  Credentials are one of those things that amplify social effect. A good person with credentials can do more good more easily. An idiot, dishonest person, or delusional ideologue with credentials can do a lot of harm. A good example of the latter effect is that thoroughly debunked autism/vaccine paper from a while back that has probably cost thousands of lives at a minimum.
- sublinear 2y ago
  I bet this guy still made better decisions than any AI as well.
- arp242 2y ago
  Asking "will these trains actually work on our infrastructure?" is a pretty obvious question to ask, not requiring any great in-depth engineering education or insight. This is also the sort of question a chief engineer can just delegate to an underling to research. It's of course easy for me to say that in hindsight, but you really do need to be beyond clueless to never even consider it. I just did high school, don't know much about trains, and I'm reasonably sure I would checked. I might have been found out in some other way, but not through this. Seems more of a good old-fashioned corruption case. And oh yes, by the way, he also faked his PhD.
charlie0 2y ago
Should have gone into politics.
SoftTalker 2y ago
Do employers actually check references and claimed qualifications anymore? Or do you just have to do well at solving interview puzzles?
- massysett 2y ago
  Yes, my employer routinely calls references before hiring, and as a supervisor I have answered many reference calls regarding former employees.
- jamesfinlayson 2y ago
  Apparently, though I often wonder what the HR department actually asks given some of the people that I've worked with.
bdcravens 2y ago
Hence why throwing around the term "engineer" in software is silly. There's little consequence to misrepresenting yourself in software, other than your immediate employment and maybe a financial lawsuit. In other professions, enforcement has real teeth due to the stakes of failure.
- itronitron 2y ago
  But so many bugs in software can be fixed by just turning the computer off and back on again. Is that great engineering or bad?
  - zo1 2y ago
    To be honest, "engineers" in the physical sciences generally have a much easier and predictable time than programmers. Is that perhaps a fault of programmers, very possibly (nevermind, definitely our own doing). The reason I say they have an easier time is that a lot of their "problems" are solved, have general solutions and lookups, best practices that you can not deviate from, etc. E.g. look at the amount of times we all have to re-invent distributed work queues and notifying other systems of something. If we were in the context of physical engineering, there would be maybe 4 options, all with well-understood pros/cons and you just pick the one that fits your performance profile and requirements. Done. And then sure, we could get some "certified engineer" software title where a person can confidently say "yes I sign off that if you use this option, and your estimated load of messages per second never exceeds Y, and you have provisioned X-units of compute on your server, then you will lose less than 0.01% of messages." What an easy job that would be - Except we have countless hipster-devs all wanting to "do it their own way" and write their own library for it.
    - jpc0 2y ago
      You used message queues which is a hard problem and compared it to what is probably a simple problem in engineering, picking a material or screw size or such. You have disciplines in software that can easily be equated to the engineering you described, many people get paid a lot of money to create CRUD apps. Which database do you select, how do you implement the webserver, do you seperate out the API and frontend? these are all pretty easy problems to solve and have solutions with obvious pros and cons, sure you can have someone try some novel technique every now and then but the industry as a whole know how to do that. When you start discussing distributed systems it's kind of in autonomous Mars rover territory, the best practices are kind of there but there isn't a ton of consensus that what is known is even the best solution.
PointyFluff 2y ago
[dead]
seper8 2y ago
Interesting. In the Netherlands our prime minister candidate was killed a while ago. Killer was on the street within ten years. Imagine that? Someone killing Kamala Harris and being allowed on the street again after ten years? Volkert van de Graaf. Look it up... Compared to that 15 years is quite excessive...
- ojosilva 2y ago
  An engineering mistake here could become a huge derailment resulting in loss of hundreds of lives. A 15 year sentence is quite lenient in fact if you think about it.
  - ranger_danger 2y ago
    Mistakes happen even without fake credentials, none of which result in 15 year sentences...
- some_random 2y ago
  I don't think that argument really says what you want it to say about the Netherlands's vs South Africa's approach to sentencing.
- petre 2y ago
  > Killer was on the street within ten years. Imagine that? Progressive European policies I guess. We'll see Anders Brevik roam free shortly. Maybe he could than meet Volkert van de Graaf and have a chat about their favourite subjects.
Davidp00 2y ago
>He had started working at Prasa 15 years earlier, shooting up the ranks to become chief engineer, thanks to his fake qualifications. This is the bit I find remarkable. He actually did the job for 15 years and moved up to chief engineer. Was he actually a good engineer or did his performance not matter at all for his career progress?
- pertymcpert 2y ago
  TFA says under him they bought trains from Spain that were useless in SA because they were too tall. So...
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
"However, the court in Johannesburg heard that he had only completed his high-school education." He could have been a "software engineer" no problem. No engineering degree needed.
rldjbpin 2y ago
given the demographics here, i can imagine for many of us the first impression was "someone lying on their cv for a tech job got caught". but "real" engineering (as my core engineer professors used to snark at us) has real-life consequence and many countries have laws for holding their work accountable. this is just an example of that but to save face, they are focusing on their credentials in this case. as an "engineer" in tech myself, i really feel that our industry misappropriates a lot of these terms, at least for job titles. i am all for naming consistently this way, but we need to also treat what we do in the same lens then. like the recent crowdstrike incident would have also resulted in jailing someone, but not sure if we need to be that serious about it.

93 points by cwwc 2y ago

pavel_lishin 2y ago

Not a software engineer, fyi.

buran77 2y ago
"Engineer" in the software world is just a job title like calling yourself a "scrum ninja". It's not a protected title like "professional engineer" in the US or the equivalent in SA. The bar for the former is "I like it", the bar for the latter is usually set by law. Lying about your software engineering chops might get you fired, maybe even on the hook in a civil lawsuit. Lying about being a professional engineer while practicing engineering is usually a criminal matter. So I can't imagine lying about your software engineering chops landing you in prison even if we're talking about critical sectors like medical or aerospace.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  >"Engineer" in the software world is just a job title like calling yourself a "scrum ninja". It's not a protected title like "professional engineer" in the US getting an engineering degree from a university requires you to study a lot of the same higher mathematics regardless of specific field, and entitles you to call yourself an engineer, even in CS. the "professional engineer" certification is a bit more vocational, indicates you've passed qualifying exams based less on intense math and more on your knowing standards for specific govt building codes, etc.
  - SkyPuncher 2y ago
    The school I went to was 80% mechanical engineers. Had they offered computer engineering, as compared to computer science, my degree would have had more overlap with physical science than virtual science (of computer engineering). It’s just not a practical degree in the US. You don’t need thermodynamics, statics, and a bunch of other physical engineering requirements to build software.
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    I am not aware of the US having any laws on who can call themselves Engineer or not - it's not like Canada. Having a printer and a sheet of business card blanks entitles me to call myself an engineer.
    - avhon1 2y ago
      It's legislated by individual states. A well-known example is Mats Järlström in Oregon, USA. https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-light-timing-lawsuit/ https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...
      - bee_rider 2y ago
        That press release seems to be specifically about their failure to get him to stop using the term “engineer,” and the fact that the legal system recognizes a difference between it and the more protected term “professional engineer.”
    - fsckboy 2y ago
      > laws on who can call themselves Engineer or not - it's not like Canada It is like Canada in practice, depends on the terminolgoy they use. The two world's of "engineering" are so separated from each other, that's why I wrote a comment and that's why you are unaware of the distinction. You have skyscrapers in Canada, oui? If you want to change something structural on the facade (O, Canada, I mean façade) near the top of a skyscraper, like put in a balcony/observation deck, they are not going to let you do that till your plans are reviewed by a licensed engineer. Not any old engineer, only by somebody Licensed to review plans like that, who will take into account everything that needs to be taken into account, like crap falling on pedestrians walking below, 30 years from now when the concrete is starting to disintegrate. That is a licensed engineer. Canada has them. You don't know about them because you don't own a skyscraper. I know about them because I was on my condo board... in a skyscraper. they do structural, electrical, HVAC, plumbing, etc.
  - bitfilped 2y ago
    Computer Science is a science degree, not an engineering one.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    The core of classic engineering is learning how to work with Mother Nature OS. In software engineering you almost never have to deal with that absolute gut punch of an OS (usually at worst you just have to deal with the humans who are a product of it), and don't need to take classes to learn about it.
    - fsckboy 2y ago
      i went to a school where you can't get a CS degree without getting half of an EE degree, and vice versa, the good old EECS department there are traditions where CS came out of Math, still STEM but not generally part of the School of Engineering
  - jpambrun 2y ago
    To be a professional engineer, or just engineer really, you need to maintain your license, be in good standing with the regulatory bodyz have professional insurance, etc. The regulatory body can impose fine, mandatory training or disbar you for any ethical or technical deficiency. It's not a one time certification as you seem to believe.
- bschmidt1 2y ago
  Despite being called an "engineer" a lot in recent years, it always feels icky because of what you just said here about it being a protected title in other industries. Not quite imposter syndrome - just feels like the wrong word for our job. It at least leaves out the linguistic/creative aspect of programming, and the execution/quality aspect of putting it all together. It's more like digital construction: Programming is more like the construction project, and less like the AutoCAD "design" piece that engineers work on. The AutoCAD piece has more in common with product design than programming. If anything, designers should be "engineers" and "eng. directors", and programmers should be "technicians" and "technical directors". They engineer products, with deliverables being design documents. And the techs implement it with the deliverable being the technology itself.
  - TremendousJudge 2y ago
    I use the title because it's what the piece of paper my university gave me when I graduated says. "Programming" is a portion of my job, alongside reviewing other people's work, design, and sitting around in meetings with people who don't have technical knowledge. Any mechanical, electrical, civil, etc, engineer will have a similar experience in many cases, except replace "programming" with something related to their area
    - crawfishphase 2y ago
      professional engineer license is required in addition to graduating and other prerequisites to be called "professional engineer" tho, no? school alone is not enough to be designated a "professional engineer", right?
      - mlhpdx 2y ago
        And with respect to professional engineers there is this obscure little tidbit[1]. There is nothing of the sort in software as far as I know. [1] https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics/engineers-creed https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics/engineers-...
  - 2y ago
- BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
  I completely agree, but we need some kind of title to differentiate the people who are as versed in CS and pragmatic programming - from the lowest asm/C to Lisps and MLs - and the typical JavaScript dev who did a web course. At least here, both are called (software) developers and I really don't want to be painted with the same brush as web cowboys who don't value stability and things done "properly".

m3kw9 2y ago

Fraud lands…

Terr_ 2y ago
True, I myself could whip up a a dozen fake CVs/resumes right now with no jail risk whatsoever, the real crime is fraud and the CV was just an implementation detail.

bhouston 2y ago

This is more than just a fake resume. He claimed to be an engineer, which is a profession with real formal qualifications, because there are real consequences (e.g. buildings falling down, bridges collapsing, people dying.)

alephnerd 2y ago
He also forged qualifications and references. The case is also linked to the larger system of patronage and state capture that existed under Zuma, where if you paid the right people who back then were in the ANC, plenty of doors would open up. Cyril Ramaphosa began a cleanup of the ANC, but it's still a work in progress AND Zuma and his patronage network have created their own party that is undercutting the ANC's vote share (at least the private sector forced the ANC-DA-IFP coalition). It's a stunning reversal for a country that 15 years ago was on track to become a developed country. South Africa in the late 2000s to 2011 was at the same distance from becoming a World Bank High Income country that Serbia and China are at today in the late 2010s and early 2020s, and South African companies like Naspers (Reddit, Tencent, VK, StackOverflow, Udemy, OLX), MTN Group (major telco player in MENA), ShopRite (major retailer across Africa which is basically a Walmart or Lidl-lite), and Vodacom (major telco and formerly satellite player in MENA and Asia) were on track to becoming major players globally.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  "Zuma and his patronage network have created their own party that is undercutting the ANC's vote share." At least they are in the opposition now and not in government. If they stayed within ANC, they would have much more influence.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    And don’t forget that there’s always the threat of the EFF Nazbols and their red shirts…
loceng 2y ago
What if he outsourced his work to actual engineers?..

ihsw 2y ago

[dead]

drbig 2y ago

Railway engineering... 15 years career, which tells quite a lot about a lot of things, generally nothing good. Best aspect is it doesn't seem anyone got physically hurt in "the process of career progression". Quite scary.

PaywallBuster 2y ago

> earning an annual salary of about 2.8m rand ($156,000; £119,000). > he had forged a job offer letter from a German company, which encouraged Prasa to increase his salary > He was also at the forefront of a 600m rand deal to buy dozens of new trains from Spain, but they could not be used in South Africa

masfuerte 2y ago
Spanish trains don't fit in Spanish tunnels either! https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/02/21/unspeakable-botch-spain-spends-258-million-on-trains-that-are-too-big-for-its-tunnels https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/02/21/unspeakable-botch... (The manufacturer actually warned that they were the wrong trains and the Spanish state rail company ignored them.)
randerson 2y ago
600m rand is about $34 million. If "dozens" means at least 24 trains, that seems... surprisingly cheap per train, especially for government spending?
- PaywallBuster 2y ago
  > The thirteen Afro 4000 diesel locomotives that have so far been delivered to Prasa are worth R600 million and form part of a larger R3.5 billion order for 70 new locomotives. https://groundup.org.za/article/spain-investigates-the-too-tall-trains-sale-while-south-africa-takes-no-action/ https://groundup.org.za/article/spain-investigates-the-too-t... https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/92966/new-report-shows-how-prasa-tried-to-lower-the-afro-4000-locomotives/ https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/92966/new-report-... I think most commonly they'll use dozens for any number larger than 12, not specifically a multiple of it

observationist 2y ago

Looks like he ordered trains that were too tall, risking issues with tunnels, turn engineering, derailment, etc, and got caught by people who actually did know the engineering and science involved. Some things require credentials because it's evidence that the person knows what questions to ask, what to look for, and how to plan within the constraints of their domain of expertise. This guy could probably do a great job supporting a person or team that had the right training, but his ignorance was risky, regardless of his intentions. I've seen the flip side, too, where PhDs have given awful people license to behave badly, inflicting their "expertise" on people as if it made up for the lack of diligence and follow-through, leaving destroyed companies and people in their wake. Gotta have the work ethic and the training - the institutions behind formal engineering disciplines do a great job of ensuring they qualify the people who will put in the work and know what they're doing.

api 2y ago
Credentials are one of those things that amplify social effect. A good person with credentials can do more good more easily. An idiot, dishonest person, or delusional ideologue with credentials can do a lot of harm. A good example of the latter effect is that thoroughly debunked autism/vaccine paper from a while back that has probably cost thousands of lives at a minimum.
sublinear 2y ago
I bet this guy still made better decisions than any AI as well.
arp242 2y ago
Asking "will these trains actually work on our infrastructure?" is a pretty obvious question to ask, not requiring any great in-depth engineering education or insight. This is also the sort of question a chief engineer can just delegate to an underling to research. It's of course easy for me to say that in hindsight, but you really do need to be beyond clueless to never even consider it. I just did high school, don't know much about trains, and I'm reasonably sure I would checked. I might have been found out in some other way, but not through this. Seems more of a good old-fashioned corruption case. And oh yes, by the way, he also faked his PhD.

charlie0 2y ago

Should have gone into politics.

SoftTalker 2y ago

Do employers actually check references and claimed qualifications anymore? Or do you just have to do well at solving interview puzzles?

massysett 2y ago
Yes, my employer routinely calls references before hiring, and as a supervisor I have answered many reference calls regarding former employees.
jamesfinlayson 2y ago
Apparently, though I often wonder what the HR department actually asks given some of the people that I've worked with.

bdcravens 2y ago

Hence why throwing around the term "engineer" in software is silly. There's little consequence to misrepresenting yourself in software, other than your immediate employment and maybe a financial lawsuit. In other professions, enforcement has real teeth due to the stakes of failure.

itronitron 2y ago
But so many bugs in software can be fixed by just turning the computer off and back on again. Is that great engineering or bad?
- zo1 2y ago
  To be honest, "engineers" in the physical sciences generally have a much easier and predictable time than programmers. Is that perhaps a fault of programmers, very possibly (nevermind, definitely our own doing). The reason I say they have an easier time is that a lot of their "problems" are solved, have general solutions and lookups, best practices that you can not deviate from, etc. E.g. look at the amount of times we all have to re-invent distributed work queues and notifying other systems of something. If we were in the context of physical engineering, there would be maybe 4 options, all with well-understood pros/cons and you just pick the one that fits your performance profile and requirements. Done. And then sure, we could get some "certified engineer" software title where a person can confidently say "yes I sign off that if you use this option, and your estimated load of messages per second never exceeds Y, and you have provisioned X-units of compute on your server, then you will lose less than 0.01% of messages." What an easy job that would be - Except we have countless hipster-devs all wanting to "do it their own way" and write their own library for it.
  - jpc0 2y ago
    You used message queues which is a hard problem and compared it to what is probably a simple problem in engineering, picking a material or screw size or such. You have disciplines in software that can easily be equated to the engineering you described, many people get paid a lot of money to create CRUD apps. Which database do you select, how do you implement the webserver, do you seperate out the API and frontend? these are all pretty easy problems to solve and have solutions with obvious pros and cons, sure you can have someone try some novel technique every now and then but the industry as a whole know how to do that. When you start discussing distributed systems it's kind of in autonomous Mars rover territory, the best practices are kind of there but there isn't a ton of consensus that what is known is even the best solution.

PointyFluff 2y ago

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seper8 2y ago

Interesting. In the Netherlands our prime minister candidate was killed a while ago. Killer was on the street within ten years. Imagine that? Someone killing Kamala Harris and being allowed on the street again after ten years? Volkert van de Graaf. Look it up... Compared to that 15 years is quite excessive...

ojosilva 2y ago
An engineering mistake here could become a huge derailment resulting in loss of hundreds of lives. A 15 year sentence is quite lenient in fact if you think about it.
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  Mistakes happen even without fake credentials, none of which result in 15 year sentences...
some_random 2y ago
I don't think that argument really says what you want it to say about the Netherlands's vs South Africa's approach to sentencing.
petre 2y ago
> Killer was on the street within ten years. Imagine that? Progressive European policies I guess. We'll see Anders Brevik roam free shortly. Maybe he could than meet Volkert van de Graaf and have a chat about their favourite subjects.

Davidp00 2y ago

>He had started working at Prasa 15 years earlier, shooting up the ranks to become chief engineer, thanks to his fake qualifications. This is the bit I find remarkable. He actually did the job for 15 years and moved up to chief engineer. Was he actually a good engineer or did his performance not matter at all for his career progress?

pertymcpert 2y ago
TFA says under him they bought trains from Spain that were useless in SA because they were too tall. So...

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

"However, the court in Johannesburg heard that he had only completed his high-school education." He could have been a "software engineer" no problem. No engineering degree needed.

rldjbpin 2y ago

given the demographics here, i can imagine for many of us the first impression was "someone lying on their cv for a tech job got caught". but "real" engineering (as my core engineer professors used to snark at us) has real-life consequence and many countries have laws for holding their work accountable. this is just an example of that but to save face, they are focusing on their credentials in this case. as an "engineer" in tech myself, i really feel that our industry misappropriates a lot of these terms, at least for job titles. i am all for naming consistently this way, but we need to also treat what we do in the same lens then. like the recent crowdstrike incident would have also resulted in jailing someone, but not sure if we need to be that serious about it.