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>What I'm trying to understand is, what would make an experienced senior engineer prefer such shortcuts over doing the right thing. Organizational failure. An

>What I'm trying to understand is, what would make an experienced senior engineer prefer such shortcuts over doing the right thing. Organizational failure. An onerous documentation change/approval management scheme. Covering up a mistake. A culture that causes people to fear losing their jobs, especially for cost reasons, or the feeling that company management are looking for reasons to cut staff. Having your group be blamed for an expensive product recall makes you an easy target. One of the last things a middle-aged engineer in the US auto industry wants to be right now is laid-off. We naively expect a senior engineer to do the ethically correct thing without respect to whether it has negative personal consequences. The problem with this idea is that the consequences for being "that guy" are too great; and both engineering societies and state licensing boards have been derelict in their roles of helping to protect engineers who refuse to do the ethically gray/wrong. >I interpret it as the deadline being a root cause. At the heart of any complex issue lies one or more root cause(s). There are so many things wrong with product engineering management, but yeah laying a deadline that no engineer has the courage to break would definitely be one of them.

zaroth 12y ago
It doesn't sound like such a horrible position to be in; working for a multi-billion dollar company that was trying to force you to ship a part that could kill people. Whistleblowers get 1/3rd of damages, it's like wining the lottery for ethical people. How long does it normally take to design one of these switches, when you've been doing it most of your life? Knowing absolutely nothing about the complexity of these switches, but knowing what small hardware teams have been able to accomplish at companies I've worked at, 3 years sounds like a more than reasonable time frame.
- fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
  >It doesn't sound like such a horrible position to be in; working for a multi-billion dollar company that was trying to force you to ship a part that could kill people. It's probably not a case of some moustache twisting monocle wearing fiend who was the manager and the engineer was absolutely convinced that it was a faulty part that would ultimately be responsible for death and destruction. It was more likely one of a number of similar sub-assemblies, all having some questionable attributes and people trying to ship things under the guise of "perfect is the enemy of the good". At some points along this road, various people probably began realizing that there was a real problem, one that they might have some culpability in. Why the people involved continued to make poor decisions, I don't know. >Whistleblowers get 1/3rd of damages, it's like wining the lottery for ethical people. It's a nice theory. I've yet to see it happen consistently in practice (or pretty much ever). Engineering ethics case studies are littered with cases where engineers tried to alert management of problems and were punished for their efforts. >How long does it normally take to design one of these switches, when you've been doing it most of your life? Not very long given ample resources and nothing else to do. I doubt they were working under those conditions.

zaroth 12y ago

It doesn't sound like such a horrible position to be in; working for a multi-billion dollar company that was trying to force you to ship a part that could kill people. Whistleblowers get 1/3rd of damages, it's like wining the lottery for ethical people. How long does it normally take to design one of these switches, when you've been doing it most of your life? Knowing absolutely nothing about the complexity of these switches, but knowing what small hardware teams have been able to accomplish at companies I've worked at, 3 years sounds like a more than reasonable time frame.

fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
>It doesn't sound like such a horrible position to be in; working for a multi-billion dollar company that was trying to force you to ship a part that could kill people. It's probably not a case of some moustache twisting monocle wearing fiend who was the manager and the engineer was absolutely convinced that it was a faulty part that would ultimately be responsible for death and destruction. It was more likely one of a number of similar sub-assemblies, all having some questionable attributes and people trying to ship things under the guise of "perfect is the enemy of the good". At some points along this road, various people probably began realizing that there was a real problem, one that they might have some culpability in. Why the people involved continued to make poor decisions, I don't know. >Whistleblowers get 1/3rd of damages, it's like wining the lottery for ethical people. It's a nice theory. I've yet to see it happen consistently in practice (or pretty much ever). Engineering ethics case studies are littered with cases where engineers tried to alert management of problems and were punished for their efforts. >How long does it normally take to design one of these switches, when you've been doing it most of your life? Not very long given ample resources and nothing else to do. I doubt they were working under those conditions.