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Comment by draugadrotten | Hacker News Reader

>You have to consider ethics in your work as an Engineer. Refusing an unethical task is your moral duty.

It's easy to say, but ethics isn´t always so black and white. What about yourself. Do you drive a car? Then you are guilty of contributing to the air pollution that kills 200,000 in the US ever year, and you also endanger others' life by participating in traffic and making it more dangerous. You are also contributing to sponsoring the salaries of the car industry overall, which means you are indirectly sponsoring the development of more lethal machines, which also by the way enables murderers to transport themselves more rapidly to their victims.

Did you post a helpful comment on HN or stackoverflow, and this comment helped a programmer in North Korea to develop their nuclear weapons just a little bit further, is that ethical?

You have to consider ethics, but an "unethical task" depends so much on context.

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I think there is a major difference in butterfly effect scenarios and intentionally misleading and commiting fraud. It's why mens rea is part of the equation for judgement. Intent means a lot; if it weren't, we wouldn't differentiate between manslaughter and murder.

The VW engineers intentionally designed a system meant to defraud tests and avoid regulations, misleading consumers and regulators about the product. This was an order from on high, I dont doubt, but it's still an intentiknal decision. I do this knowing the direct result is fraud and pollution. My intent is to commit fraud, and I do not care about the side effect of pollution. And it's not really possible to not know what the intent of such a system is.

I think we do need to be aware of the impact of our decisions and our choices, and we cannot just dismiss unethical choices on the basis of "everything could be bad.". That's just eschewing responsibility.

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.

What you describe is true and makes it harder to prosecute the management. That does not excuse individual engineers for effectively their own decisions.

Leaving such company or not having much career is ethically much higher then participating at fraud. And engineers do such decisions and earn less money because they did such decisions.

Another contributing factor is larger culture that treats such people as losers or "makers of excuses" for lesser success and excuses or celebrates those who merely did not get caught.

Thankfully, the company that I work for now is entirely different: my colleagues are a truly exemplary bunch of people, and working with them is a joy.

I find that the rule "you are always responsible for bad outcomes in proportion to your ability to prevent them" to be a fairly straightforward principle.

And from that rule we are of course all guilty but some are more guilty than others. I assume I'm kind of stating obvious stuff though?

The context was pretty clear here. This particular engineer got asked to do something he knew was unethical and he did it anyway. That is pretty black on white to me.

Consumer behaviour is an entirely different thing.

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.

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