Is the VW emissions-test bypass a consequence of developer culture?

This article makes the claim that engineering culture easily can lead to long-lasting misfeatures. The author surmises that the emissions workaround started as a debugging hack, and gradually got institutionalized. The author compares it to the flight simulator easter egg in Excel 97 (but makes clear the different scale of consequences).

It also says modern cars have 100 megalines of code.

I wonder how plausible these things are? If the engineering-culture explanation is plausible, I wonder if our profession needs some kind of registered professional engineer status? I wonder if we need a code of ethics that we're each personally answerable to?

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