Toyota Unintended Acceleration and the Big Bowl of “Spaghetti” Code (2013)

Is that why it just disappeared from the front page listing?

I can understand tweaking it down in the rating algorithm, but if there's enough people that want to chime in that it makes it to the front page even after it's been covered before, removing it entirely seems fairly heavy handed.

These are not well educated programmers. They are probably run of the mill undereducated software engineers from an outsourcing company. They do not recognize the technical issue here, albeit report an ethical issue.

Companies like Toyota generally outsource software development to other companies like Bosch. Bosch employs a bunch of programmers in Bangalore who are just out of college, and pay them peanuts to develop a safety critical system.

  * they are part of a big enough team that individual responsibility is removed
  * they're not given enough time to produce good quality code
  * the design came from someone without sufficient expertise, and the programmers "just built it"
  * they did the best given the time they had
  * it passed testing
  * programmers are generally not empowered to make go/no-go decisions
  * even if they did express concern they may not have been listened to
  * any internal challenges on ethical grounds were probably kept quiet and worked around

Usually with this kind of incident there are multiple process and quality failures, not just "why did the programmers not do better"

Would that be like a whistlerblower program?

Because we know how that always ends, with the person driven out of the company or set up to be fired.

The only way to get big corporations to behave is prison time for executives so they become paranoid about doing things right. Unfortunately in the USA we never ever seem to do that, we just give them a few million dollars in fines instead which they pay with the next month's profits (ala BP).

Part of it, I'm sad to say, is that many, many programmers don't see themselves as professionals, but rather as mere laborers. If you try to get a doctor or a lawyer or a structural engineer to do something egregiously wrong, they'll generally know that they're crossing a line. They see themselves as having a responsibility for the human effects of their work.

Many programmers, though, will do whatever they're told, even when they know it's pointless, wasteful, or dangerous. I've read literally hundreds of stories about programmers working on something that was egregiously fucked up. But I've heard damned few stories where programmers refused to do something they thought wrong and either a) got management to back down, or b) got fired for their refusal to do something unethical.

I don't blame individuals for that. We're not trained as professionals, we don't have a professional organization that most of us join, and we therefore don't have a serious professional code of ethics. It's unreasonable to expect most people to make ethical stands alone while creating a code on the fly. But I'd love to see the situation fixed.

Clearly you've never been a magician. ;) It's easy to hide things in the band with invisible slight of hand.

I suspect cars are more fly-by-wire than you realize. And wasn't this issue with the throttle control? I suppose you could have downshifted with either type of transmission, but most drivers aren't prepared for sudden mechanical failure like this.

Article dated 2013, not news.