VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

That’s certainly true. Deterrence is one of the classic justifications for punishment (and for crimes like this that don’t involve direct violence or specific victims, it’s perhaps the best or most significant justification). But still, the strength of the deterrence is related not just to the specific punishment, but also the likelihood of being caught. I don’t have any data to back this up, but my intuition is that crimes like this of this magnitude are very difficult and thus unlikely to discover and successfully prosecute, especially down to the level of specific engineers. My guess is that this whole situation will provide some deterrence at the large corporation level, but probably not much deterrence at the individual engineer level.

It is not the expectation of jail time, but certainty of a punishment is what matters. See https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2016/03/crimina... and references therein for actual research.

In Germany the automotive industry is basically the last bastion of high union membership.

I could easily see the interviewer twist this to ask the next question "But does that mean you won't be loyal to us??"

It actually does not help to say this answer, it would go over badly in 95% of interviews no matter how egregious the unethical request. The interviewer typically questions if you're being truthful and if they will be accused of the same in the future. When I worked as an agent, we generally coached people to state one of the other reasons they quit or were fired and if ever asked the interview question "Have you ever been asked to do something illegal or unethical?" to just answer "No."

The only time you're allowed to mention this is when it becomes easily verifiable in something like a newspaper. I actually have personal experience in one of my jobs where the owners very casually asked me to do some unethical things and then shrugged it off. At the time I highly suspected I was fired because of it, but had no evidence. So for years at interviews when asked why I was fired, my answer was "Nepotism," which is true because they replaced me with an incompetent relative. The FTC shut them down 5 years after I was fired. I only mention it if the employer tries to verify past employment and asks why the phone number doesn't work.

I'd suggest you drop the "or unethical" part if you're actually going to actually use this. The law is a fair amount more objective (still lots of subjectivity but it's not perceived to be as subjective) whereas personal ethical standards are extremely subjective (and perceived that way). Many companies see the former as 'I don't want to break the law and go to jail' and the latter as 'I get to impose my personal standard of ethics on all my bosses and the entire company and if they don't like it I'll throw a fit and quit in the middle of a critical project while accusing them of being monsters.' If you can add the word repeatedly, it might help. It suggests you wouldn't do something illegal but wouldn't quit if someone asked you once (possibly by mistake not knowing it was illegal) but if you get asked again after you clarified it was illegal and you wouldn't do it and they wanted you to do it anyway that leads to you quitting.

But that would increase the likelihood of losing your job by refusing and decrease the ease of finding a different job?

Losing your job either way in all likelihood.

Evidence of what? Your crime? Or that someone told you to commit a crime, and you did?

Millions of people in the US alone don’t have the privilege to be that principled.

Unless it's a Pickelhaube.

+ suits in a court for employment-related matters (Arbeitsgericht) are free for the employee in Germany

Volkswagen is actually a prime example of German corporate culture. At least in stock listed companies in Germany this seems to be common, since Germany lacks in laws that would execute an appropriate punishment.

yea, but we're not talking about the rest of the world in this thread, are we? also seems a little misguided to defend to a generalization with another generalization. no?

lighten up guys. it was kind of funny.

The German government doesn't control the prosecution. Especially not because it's not a federal investigation. Criminal matters are state matters, with very few exceptions.

And to counter your next try: No, the government of Lower Saxony does not control the prosecution either.

"everybody who has anything to do with this affront to the EPA shall burn at the stake"

Oops. I meant does NOT feel like justice.

Except, they don't work with actual source code. An engineering team responsible for adaptation for certain market, most likely works in calibration space, that's it, just data (flags, thresholds and tables, thousands of them). To access this data they rely on ASAP2 description databases which are simply very large text files [1] containing ROM addresses, parameter names, etc. I don't know the whole VW workflow, but can imagine how one could define a set of switching parameters for cheating, and then delete their definitions, leaving these parameters invisible.

[1] https://vector.com/vi_datadescription_ecu1_en.html

Who said it was his job on the line if he didn't? Quite frankly, it was his choice to engineer the cheat, whether he was ordered to by threat of employment or not.

Without putting words into w_t_payne's mouth (and at risk of incurring the ire of HNers who are wary of them), unions would be one such form of organization.

Other such organizations might include software engineering guilds but I don't think such guilds generally act to protect the interests of software engineers collectively or individually.

For various historical and professional reasons, software developers have not seriously considered unionization as a means of advancing their interests. However, unions typically do protect their members from arbitrary and unfair work termination.

YMMV

EDIT: change indirect object of first sentence in last paragraph.

IEEE and ACM are the professional organizations for software engineering. They even jointly published a code of ethics for software engineering: https://www.computer.org/web/education/code-of-ethics.

That's one way to calculate it.

Other times, people measure life in "quality-adjusted years". So a coal plant that kills a young person every 20 years is worse than one that kills 78-year-olds regularly. This is a more rigorous method, measuring quality*years instead of deaths, which is why you almost never see it in activist claims. It's too rigorous to be manipulated.

Other times, people just look at the immediate cause of death (e.g. lung cancer) and extrapolate to the cause of that cause (e.g. air pollution). But this imports a lot of assumptions and is easy to game. For example, I've seen cases where hundreds of thousands of deaths have been attributed to a given cause, but it turns out that those people were dying just a few years short of average life expectancy, and would've died for other reasons very soon regardless - quite different from the image of people in their prime dying needlessly.

It's good to question these figures. As they are currently presented, we don't know the methodology, which makes them meaningless.

I agree with you that the unethical nature of what he did was black and white. But why is consumer behavior any different?

Plenty of HN coding and chemistry wizards work for the 'defense' industry.

It doesn't have to be an order on high.

The engineering management team is pretty good at making sure that such orders are almost never given explicitly. If they absolutely must to be given explicitly, then they are never ever given in writing. Most of the time, though, they don't need to be.

All you need to do is to create a culture where even the smallest failure is not acceptable, where employees are regularly abused by aggressive managers; where individuals are put under immense pressure to achieve the impossible, and where questions about how those results were achieved are simply not asked.

There is an unrelenting pressure to conform; to demonstrate outstanding results; to make it look like everything is running smoothly, and to hide failings and faults, even if that means lying to your manager, lying to your customers, lying to your colleagues, lying to everyone.

I have seen project managers lie in the most brazen way to customers and to auditors. I have seen more than one test engineer who would rather fake a test passing than show that the product does not work.

The automotive industry is to a large extent a moral vacuum, and there are dozens if not hundreds of managers and engineers across the industry who should by rights be behind bars and by whose continued freedom we not only damage the moral fabric of an industry, but also endanger the health and safety of innocent people all around the world.