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Comment by mindfulplay | Hacker News Reader

This is what happens when software companies that have traditionally had an incentive to "fail fast, fail often" mentality ship something in the physical world.

Especially something as powerful as a ton of steel moving like a missle on our roads.

Absolutely stunningly stupid that there are teams that built this and felt incentivized to put this on our roads without any concerns or safety mechanism. Shameful.

Legally, it will be amazing in the future to hold these people - the engineers, product managers, the PR people and the CEO (ex and current) all accountable. We did for something far less serious with VW...

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I have to blame management in this regard. There must have certainly been engineers that spoke up about this problem who may be silenced by NDA's (or other means), even if they did resign in protest.

Stopping in time to not run over an unexpected pedestrian crossing the road would be item number one on any sensible person's agenda. Uber needs to be liquidated.

We shouldn't assume that engineers have spoken up about this problem. All the same incentives (stock, bonuses) and fears (pushback for whistleblowers, an anti-truth company culture, getting fired) that apply to management apply to engineers, too. Engineers are fallible people, too.

I think most people here can relate to being an engineer who is held to other people's unrealistic expectations. Problems happen when there is not a critical mass of individuals to push back on those requirements. It's possible that this project is Uber's last ditch effort at existing, in which case there would be enormous pressure on everyone to make self-driving work at any cost. It was a design decision to disable the car's stock automatic braking feature, for example. It's not that they're stupid, it's that they're putting their morals on the shelf in order to get this to work.

At some point you need to have a regulatory body in place that sets standard for safety, otherwise people are going to die.

> It's possible that this project is Uber's last ditch effort at existing, in which case there would be enormous pressure on everyone to make self-driving work at any cost.

If you're an engineer at Uber and you're facing this kind of pressure that's causing you to take safety shortcuts, walk away. Go work somewhere else.

Real engineers are responsible for their decisions they can't just defer personal responsibility to management.

If you build a bridge you know is unsafe because the company you work for will go under if it doesn't get built, it's still your fault when the bridge fails and kills people.

Walk away.

Disagree. Waymo is a software company and gone more miles than anyone self driving and not killed anyone.

I think the key difference is the fail fast policy that was being referred to. Waymo has taken a much slower approach than Uber.

Would agree but Waymo is the only one with cars on the road right now without safety drivers.

Just appears Waymo is well ahead of everyone else.

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