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Comment by ramenmeal | Hacker News Reader

"James Robert Liang, leader of diesel competence for VW"

He's not an individual engineer, he was a team lead from the sound of it. Also, your experience "at a big company" has no relevance here.

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"Leader of diesel competence" -- that sounds like one of those generated Silicon Valley job titles you get off of:

http://siliconvalleyjobtitlegenerator.tumblr.com/

It turns out "VW almost exclusively promotes their engineers to managers."

"NO2 hacker"

Well technically...

How long until he got promoted to "N2O hacker"?

= P.L.E.A.S.E

This even sounds somewhere between 2 to 3 levels above team lead. As a team [lead] in automotive you are mostly only responsible for a very small part of the system, and "diesel competence" sounds more strategic. Although titles are often manager, senior manager and then director of something, so it's hard to tell what leader is. But I guess it's far more an executive position with > 200 people below than an an "actual engineer".

His responsibility is probably above zero, but I'm having a hard time decisions of this kind aren't reviewed by many peers across company layers. Unless he lied about the purpose of his work and nobody could decipher his claims... still odd (reminds me of the Kerviel bank fraud)

If he lied about his work, and none else caught it, it brings up other questions about the integrity of VW vehicles. e.g. How valid are their safety testing results (could someone in the org have submitted vehicles for crash tests that weren't representative of the production config?)

Yes - maybe engineer doing air-bags is doing the same. And also brakes... so on. These engineers are not to be trusted: we need more management oversight.

No one person should be responsible for a safety-critical feature of a vehicle. It's not about management, it's about single points of failure.

He is not an exec, he does not make corporate decissions.

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