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Comment by cup-of-tea | Hacker News Reader

The IT systems of these companies are held together loosely with gaffa tape. This kind of thing could happen at any time. This is what happens when you deliver your project due to pressure from non technical people even though you know it's not properly finished. Why do people not listen to the professionals when it comes to IT?

In my current job I have repeatedly told non technical superiors that reverse engineering an outdated API is not a proper solution and could fall apart at any time. They do not care. It doesn't even register. Do civil engineers have this problem if they realise there might be a structural weakness?

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In this particular case, the issue is that TSB split apart from a bank that was known as Lloyds TSB. However, they continued to rent their entire IT infrastructure from Lloyds for a while after that happened. This "upgrade" was actually replacing enormous parts of their branch- and customer-facing infrastructure with an entirely new system, and it's obviously gone horribly wrong.

As far as I know civil engineers can go to prison if the construction they took part in collapses - no such provision is afforded to software engineers.

Besides simply quitting, what can a civil engineer do to blow the whistle on a company that is cutting corners for a bridge?

They can "blow the whistle".

This could involve going to the press, to a standards body in the country, to the government, to their union or industry representative body.

In the UK there are laws protecting whistleblowers who take actions like this.

In the US civil engineers must go through a multi-year certification process that involves a significant amount of on the job work in addition to standardized examination before they are labelled a Professional Engineer (PE).

As a PE, they can face significant legal repercussions for errors in work they approve.

The benefit to the PE is that many Civil Engineering projects are legally required to have a PE design/approve them. The PE literally has a physical stamp they use to stamp blueprints and designs when they approve it. Work won't proceed without that stamp.

So, if a PE refused to approve a bridge design, presumably it would be very difficult to find another PE who would approve it (especially given the record of the first PE rejecting the plans) and the work would not proceed.

If software engineers could potentially face legal repercussions or jail time for serious errors, unsound technical judgment, or bad ethical decisions, it would enable a lot more push-back on these poorly-planned projects and corner cutting. I've always thought it was pretty sad that lawyers are held to higher professional and ethical standards than software engineers.

> I've always thought it was pretty sad that lawyers are held to higher professional and ethical standards than software engineers.

I think that's a bit silly. The vast majority of software is trivial stuff and no real harm is caused when something goes sideways. Few of us work on safety critical systems. When a lawyer screws up it often does a lot of harm and they are also inherently bound by our legal systems. Corruption and negligence/incompetence in this area lessens the public's faith in those systems.

Lawyers and civil engineer inherently take on far greater responsibility than your average Joe Schmoe programmer writing yet another CRUD app.

That's true, but what about the software engineers who do build world-changing stuff? I think that we should definitely hold them to a higher standard than we currently do.

>That's true, but what about the software engineers who do build world-changing stuff?

Yeah I can get behind that. I work in biotech/cancer diagnostics/prognostics and we could definitely afford a higher standard, especially around the core stuff (e.g. the CV/algorithms people, but also the typical IT end of things.)

Also a freshly minted CE (PE) is not the one signing off on a proper big bridge that's going to be a Partner

First you pass the FE exam, then you work for several years under a certified PE, then you take the PE exam. It's an 8-hour open book test, though IIRC for structural engineers it might actually be a 16-hour affair over 2 days.

If you pass, you get a stamp, which lets you approve drawings as a certified PE.

If you believe something is not designed to adequate standards, as a PE it is on you to not put your seal on the drawings. They can't build the bridge without an engineer doing this.

If you're taking about options when some other engineer has already approved the design, I'm not sure what the best course is. Maybe bring your concerns to the engineer in question and work from there.

Or if the design is fine but a contractor is cutting corners in construction and not building to the specifications, you could potentially engineer a new design to reinforce the problems, or you could make them take it out and build it right.

The executives and employees of banks can definitely go to jail if they screw up hard enough. Those in tech aren't excluded from this.

(Context: I am the Head of Engineering at a bank.)

Yeah the problem is what we acknowledge as screwing up. When a company leaks the personal data of dozen of millions of users, let private content be accessed by third party etc.. Somehow we haven't accepted that as a major failure.

And I'm not even talking about Facebook, more about things like cloud bleed. How do you even try to regulate something like this? It's not like they intended it, but they still majorly screwed up.

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