When Engineers Become Whistleblowers
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
By contrast, while it might not be a permanent career-ending event for an engineer to blow the whistle at an engineering company, it holds the significant risk of ending the engineer's career at that company. Not to mention lawsuits and the cost of finding a new job. Most every engineer I know wants to do the right thing... but those are powerful headwinds. So on the mere suspicion of misfeasance or malfeasance, the prospect of losing a job and being embroiled in a lawsuit serves as a powerful deterrent.
People will point out (correctly) that adding financial incentives will inevitably lead to a combination of malicious compliance and misreporting, so there's a line that has to be drawn. Also, protections in private sector are either toothless or come with expensive oversight, but it's clear that if the government wants more whistleblowing from the ranks of normal engineers (and that's a big 'if'), they probably need to do something more to cause it to happen besides just keep asking.
When asked to do something unethical, the P.E. has a choice: they can refuse, in which case they might lose their job; or they can comply, in which case they might lose their license altogether (and thus their job).
If you're designing a bridge, this is pretty obvious work and it's pretty isolated. What I mean by that is that A) you're not going to go off and design bridges in secret and then sell those designs to someone who will build it in secret such that the public will later make use of the bridge. At some point someone in the government is going to ask why there's a new bridge over that river. And B) there isn't a huge world wide market for bridges that has near infinite sub niches in nearly every market imaginable.
So having a professional engineer license for bridges makes sense because if the license is lost, then it really does mean the end of your career.
Software is often an engineering artifact, but it's also like mathematics. And it's also like literature. You might be able to stop someone from selling their services directly, but you can't stop them from writing code altogether without forming a terrifying oppressive distopia.
So the Professional Software Engineer might not care about losing the license because they can still sell their skills to companies on the other side of the world where there is no regulation. Or they can create their own product that contains software and sell that product. Or they can publish their software on github and somehow make enough from tips that they don't need another job. Or they can get a job that doesn't require software development but can be highly augmented by it. Or they can make websites technologically unsophisticated users.
Losing the license doesn't mean that their career is over. It is only a slight annoyance. There's always going to be enough software engineers that aren't afraid of losing a license that the ones that are afraid won't prevent anything problematic from happening.
Your base assumption that other countries than <your country> would not have regulation might be true at first, but probably not for long, and something is better than nothing.
I agree that people cannot be banned from writing software outright, but I think it is reasonable that in many situations it is reasonable that a company or agency is held to a standard that they only deploy software that has been produced through some set of engineering practices, similar to GAAP.
Imagine for a moment, a world in which every git commit requires a permit from the county planner.
Also: You will not get agreement on what the GAAP practices of software are. This industry isn't that mature.
Hear, hear.
This point cannot be overstated enough. People have been building bridges for thousands of years. Software Engineering has only really been a thing for a few dozen years. We do not know what we're doing yet and it's going to be a very long time before we do.
Different domains almost definitely need different guidelines. Different ways of thinking might even need different guidelines. Anything we try to enforce now will be seen as embarrassingly dangerous in the future on the order of using radium for wrist watches.
Also, the cost of building a bridge is many orders of magnitude higher than the cost of designing it. The cost of producing software, by contrast, is almost entirely the cost of designing it. This matters. Legal regimes that don't respect the laws of economics (which are, after all, just corollaries of the laws of physics) are bound to fail.
You are making a huge strawman.
This is false. Bridges are large and have failure cases that managers and government officials understand.
Software is invisible and has failure cases that are completely incomprehensible.
Hiring a bridge designer from another country who is really keen on avoiding the background check will raise some eyebrows.
Hiring a nearly anonymous software engineer from who knows where is business as usual for many large companies.
Bridges have pretty limited use cases. There really isn't that many places to hide if your banned.
Software is in everything. Software is used by everyone. Right now it's big enough that people can make it through an entire career without actually knowing how to program (just make sure you move jobs every few years). It's only going to get bigger. Losing a license just means that it's time to job hop again. Maybe shift gears and become a process consultant. Losing a license in software is not a deterrent.
> something is better than nothing
We have a lot techniques to evaluate what a good way is to build a bridge. Right now with software the best thing we have is code smells. It just smells bad to me. We have no ability to objectively encode what makes code good or bad. We just "know it when we see it". Something can most definitely be MUCH worse than nothing.
This data is generally fudged and hidden though by management in closed software products as well as being mislabeled.
And finally, users are not informed on how to report software issues and trained to normalize deviance - ignore problems and apply workaround.
They only think they understand.
> Software is invisible and has failure cases that are completely incomprehensible.
Which are becoming increasingly comprehensible with better tooling and data collection.
> Hiring a bridge designer from another country who is really keen on avoiding the background check will raise some eyebrows.
It does in software too; at least with serious companies.
> Hiring a nearly anonymous software engineer from who knows where is business as usual for many large companies.
These typically come through staffing companies because most large companies are awful at hiring technical talent. They have a long-term relationship with the staffing company and expect the staffing company to ensure the competency of the workers. I actually think licensing software developers would put an end to this; as it would give HR departments a relatively high-fidelity signal to sort the professionals from the hobbyists (by far the hardest thing for a non-technical person to do in hiring developers IMO).
> Maybe shift gears and become a process consultant. Losing a license in software is not a deterrent.
"Processes" are rapidly converging into off-the-shelf SaaS products, and the industry is actually starting to slow down quite a bit. Trust me, the Big 4 and similar management consulting firms are in for a world of hurt over the next 5 years as AWS, GCP and Azure start to hone in on the ERP systems and reference process space. Companies today would rather spend $1M and 2 months to implement a non-customized, off-the-shelf solution that can be maintained by cheap offshore resources than spend $30M and 2 years to build something custom that requires a dedicated support and maintenance team. Maybe there's some vendor selection and strategy up front, but all those companies that used to do process consulting just become system integrators (for guess what -- software!)
Boss: "You know Mike, I think you might be right. We'll get Ken and Joe to take a look at it and see if they can't figure out a way to make it safe. After all, they saved the day with the last big project."
Ken and Joe proceed to hack something together that's super dangerous. Mike is isolated such that he won't notice what's actually going on with his previous project and then never given another raise again.
For bonus points make sure to put your engineers on projects that you don't mind cancelling and then asking them to do something dangerous. Isolate the ones that seem nervous or raise objection and give bonuses to the ones that are fine with being reckless.
The evidence shows that you cancel projects that Mike tells you are unsafe. And the record shows that Ken and Joe have a history of saving the day. "I had no idea that Ken and Joe were cutting corners. I'm not a software person, so I rely on my experts to tell me when things are unsafe. It's all Ken and Joe's fault."
There are 10,000 virtual wires in the PLC that nobody cares about excepT for me and my coworkers in the same role, but the 30-40 physical relays and 1000 physical conductors in the power plant represented on schematics are reviewed by the customer and stamped by a Professional Engineer, because everyone understands they are expensive to change later.
Customers don't want to pay the additional cost to have their software stamped. They don't want to be told I can't fix that mechanical or civil design flaw in software because I don't want to open myself up to be liable for trying to help the customer get or keep their plant running despite some problems wiTh equipment supplied by others. People have this idea that software is easy to change. We can fix that later! Why decide now? It is a battle to arrive at the plant wiTh a complete, tested, documented control system, commission it and then shut the door and walk away. I have to be a really insistent about getting the information require to really complete my deliverables and then be very particular when other people's designs don't match what they delivered or work as intended. It is counter to my nature of wanting to solve problems instead of creating them or passing the buck, but that is what is required.
Sometimes I feel like this is cave drawings compared to other more mature fields. But maybe that's what boilermakers felt like 150 years ago.
As an aside, how does one get into a field like yours?
It is probably different on larger projects or when working for public utilities. All of the ones I have worked on are less than 50MW and are owned by corporations.
I think a lot of the automation field is learned on the job. you can take a PLC programming course but all you learn is the specifics of how to program that platform. It doesn't tell you what to program. That depends on the process you are controlling. I got in to hydro by working for a utility that owned a power plant as a student and then when looking for work after university sought out any opportunities for someone who liked programming and power plants. There are lots, but the catch is having the experience to get the job. I got in the door of a power plant by helping to program their datalogging and alerting system and then learned how to program the machines from a consultant who graciously provided me the on the job training and an owner who was willing to let me make mistakes.
Further, losing your license is not the only or the worst consequence. (https://scholarship.law.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3165...) You also assume a civil liability which would be hard to prosecute for a non-licensed software engineer.
(And yes, if the 737 MAX 8 thing is officially reported to have a significant engineering failure, some DER is going to have a very bad day.)
The engineering law is very outdated, though (last modified in the 80s), but we're working on it. Some proposals I've seen would require a P.E. for safety-sensitive code in the automotive and aerospace industries.
I know there's lots of IEEE standards that cover good practices, but they don't seem to be as adhered to as, say, ASME codes in the oil/gas industry.
Maybe there's a slow change already happening. I know controls engineer licenses have become more common and NCEES now offers a software curriculum.
The only time I heard of engineering licenses was that one Engineer in Oregon who fought a city and got fined for calling himself an engineer.[1]
[1]https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...
For different PE domains: https://ncees.org/engineering/pe/
I do not see any EEs, MEs, or SEs.
"Every state exempts from licensure engineers whose practices fit within one or more of five categories: (1) engineers working under the supervision of a licensed engineer who takes responsibility for the unlicensed engineer’s work; (2) engineers employed by public utilities; (3) engineers employed by the federal government; (4) engineers employed by a state government; and (5) “in-house” engineers employed by a manufacturing or other business firm (known as the “industrial exemption”)." [0]
Many states don't differentiate the title of PE based on discipline (although you test with a specialty). If you search in the sos website, you'll notice all are just listed as a "Professional Engineer" license. It's up to the licensee to use professional judgement on whether they are capable of signing off on a specific system (e.g., while a ME may be legally allowed to sign off on an electrical design, they should know better than to do so)
[0] https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
The result was not that nothing was done, but instead medical substances are used by non medical staff, doing unethical operations.
I think the same basically happens in the software industry: some of us have a pledge, but it just means little to nothing as anyone can replace us on the iffy parts, and we still build libraries that benefit any use.
It also reminds me of the “don’t use for evil” bit in the json license, where IBM kindly requested a special license to do whatever it wants with it.
Compared to the alternative of protecting the engineer, that seems like a rather dystopian way to encourage doing the right thing.
However, because losing your whole career is such a horrifying prospect, companies are going to have a very hard time finding an engineer willing to break the rules. When you need an engineer to sign off on something, but no one is willing to, you might re-evaluate your stance.
It's the same as trying to find a lawyer willing to break the law, in a sense. As an engineer, you're beholden to the public first, and your employer second.
In "tech", most of the noise we're hearing within the field about responsibility seems to be coming from two directions: (1) some of the most abusive/dangerous companies, looking to manage PR and give the appearance of self-regulation; and (2) people seeing this as an opportunity for their own careers as intellectual, "thought leader", or PR cover, seemingly more interested in career than mission.
What we're not hearing is many "tech" employees avoiding and fleeing the companies that are well-known to be irresponsible, sometimes arguably criminally so. Each of our mental lists of the least-responsible "tech" companies might differ, but some I'd suspect would be on most people's lists are flocked to by new grads every year. Did their colleges and general awareness of industry not clue them in, do they have no other employment options, or is responsibility not a factor in career and "total comp"?
Even those of us who don't go to what we think are the worst companies, perhaps the majority of us knowingly employ practices that a modest amount of forward thinking should suggest is irresponsible (e.g., grabbing users' data without informed consent, leaking every Web site visitor's detailed behavior to various third parties in the business of profiling, etc.). Before these practices became normalized, "tech" people could've (and often did) tell you that this sort of thing was a bad idea, and actively fought against some of them. Organizations like the EFF, CPSR, and EPIC (and efforts like PGN's Risks) started for a reason, and there was demand for that among the much smaller "tech" world. Now things we'd already foreseen as bad are normalized, and if you point it out, there's usually silence, derision, or what might as well be quoting of Ayn Rand.
However, for general audiences, two examples it picks (guns and trans rights) are some of the most controversial in the US right now (where they're famously used as political wedges, to divide and carve out support, in an attempt to grab and retain power), and perhaps also controversial among US "tech" people. Though perhaps less controversial among the designers who were the intended audience.
The piece then veers into a kind of guild-like professional solidarity, which I suppose might be relevant to the profession supporting individuals taking responsibility (e.g., no race-to-the-bottom, no infighting).
Back when I was an election integrity activist, muckraking and so forth, I'd occasionally get hot tips from insiders. Off the record, of course.
Alas, saving democracy doesn't pay very well. I couldn't figure out how to pay the bills, continue the work, and not burn out.
I'm also interested in the ombudsman role(s), and what potential for oversight and governance they have.
Being a whistleblower is astonishingly destructive to your career in many ways. Even if there wasn't the issue of getting blackballed, the psychological trauma of it is immense.
The only way you can create the psychological safety that makes it possible is to make sure the whistleblower gets paid enough that they aren't going to need to to work again. If they've got that security, they might be able to work again.
If nobody will hire a whistleblower, that leads me to believe everyone has skeletons to hide.
That statement has a "if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide" kind of vibe to me.
Or, you know, they could have just been privy to information that the company they work for was doing something shady.
> Why would you knowingly give them access even if you think you're doing everything right?
This is because you have the mindset that whistleblowers are little snitches just waiting for the opportunity to tattle.
If a company is breaking laws, they should be punished. Right?
What about that professor who pointed out that on average, most people commit 3 felonies a day? It's all a matter of what the authorities decide to prosecute.
Did you come to a full and complete stop the last time you encountered a stop sign?
1. "Why would you knowingly give them access even if you think you're doing everything right?"
Depending on the circumstances, maybe I respect their integrity and character for risking their livelihood and more to expose wrongdoing?
2. "It's just that we don't care because corporate citizens do not get the same rights as actual human citizens."
They shouldn't get the same rights. They only exist to be liability shields. Unlike the people they are composed of, nothing about them deserves empathy or fundamental rights---we grant them certain rights as a matter of public policy, not principle, because it makes our economic system work, and if that were ever to change, their rights should be changed or abolished accordingly.
For example, consider your taxes. Tax laws are always open to interpretation. You might believe you are doing everything correctly on your taxes, that the way you read the rules was correct. But would you still be undergoing a lot of stress if the IRS decided to do a compliance audit on you?
Exposing ongoing crimes in an organization is "all downside and no upside" for the organization?
The laws that both support and constrain companies -- and also individuals -- really are supposed to be there for the public good.
I think you can make a good argument that limited liability corporations should serve the public good in return for the stockholders being shielded from financial and criminal liability. Stands to reason then that government has a right to demand something in return.
On the contrary, whistleblowers go unemployed.
1. The whistleblower are always right and the company is always wrong. I've seen it go both ways. On an engineering project, a junior engineer misinterprets something, and then starts sending upset, angry emails with odd allegation. If there is any litigation about anything later, if those emails come up in discovery, you've got a multimillion dollar problem.
2. The company won't retaliate otherwise. In whistleblowing instances I've seen, the company engages in a smear campaign on the engineer. Having a billion dollar corporation hire a PI to investigate you, and then spread rumours about you to the media can kill a career. Is Julian Assange a sexual predator? Or was he set up? No one knows.
I for one, am willing to go with this. But I will add that managers (in lots of industries) take exceptional delight in messing with their employees. I'm not sure why, other than a lust for arbitrary power, but it's there. Some aerospace companies are legendary for making engineers work over holidays, and/or on Saturdays, for example. I worked in a smaller company where the owner felt he had a right to dictate how his employees should vote. In 1995.
Control issues may be more prevalent than skeletons.
Since we have a secret ballot (which is a good thing) in the US, how on earth could anyone "dictate" who you vote for?
Plenty of cases of "ballot parties" in unions, military, churches, job sites, etc.
All voting booths I've seen had a curtain for privacy.
A ballot records votes. Otherwise it's not a ballot.
Are you saying we live in a world without coercion? That various organizations haven't hosted ballot parties?
You realize that another synonym of "secret ballot" is "Australian Ballot"? US voting was apparently mostly public on to the mid 1800s. Now that we're all Originalists, I hope we're going to re-think this whole Foreign Imposition of secrecy on The Framer's desire to have accountable voting.
Would you have second thoughts about marrying someone who went through an ugly divorce? Sure, the person says the ex-spouse was the bad one. Do you accept that unquestioningly?
In German language, there actually exists no native word for "whistleblower" (one uses the English word). The German word is "Denunziant" (denunciator - I don't know whether the English word has the same negative connotation as the German one).
With the experience with the state security service (Stasi) of the GDR, people really well-understand why they don't want a denunciator in their company even if the respective person does not plan to denounce, since if there exists a potential denunciator at the workplace, everybody has to live in potential fear.
Massive fraud that was carried out with an audacity that would make Boss Hogg blush. When I initially complained, my boss told me that NASA was "a middle class welfare program" and that I shouldn't take it so seriously.
Eventually, I reached a point where I just couldn't sign off on purchasing equipment for testing an item that simply didn't exist. I was working 60 hours a week for low pay doing the work that had been reported to have been done years beforehand and just couldn't do it any more.
After taking two systems from months/years behind schedule to months ahead, I was fired. No discussion, no debate, no warnings, no notifications.
They lied to the Texas Workforce commission and said that I was warned and got caught. TWC refused to do anything about it.
NASA inspector general found that everything that I said was true, but that me being fired was not something they would handle.
There is no wrongful termination in Texas.
A decade later, the project(s) I was working on at the time was finally moved from the contractor to government funded equipment - meaning the government was going to have to do what the contractors were originally paid to do.
No one cares.
Accountants look for evidence that supports management's claims. They do not ask "why."
If you think about the type of person who tends to become an accountant they're usually more of the box-checking/completionist type rather than the model-building/creative problem-solver type that become engineers. For the most part that's a good thing.
This is a very good point. And I should probably clarify that when I wrote my original comment I was indeed thinking more of a "bookkeeper" than a CPA.
I am (fortunately) not too familiar with the AICPA's enforcement of their Code of Conduct. As far as the obligations of a CPA who suspects fraud it's more of a duty to report suspicions to someone in management who's probably not involved in the fraud and is in a position to investigate it. But it's very situation-dependent.
I honestly have little to no idea how the software I work on works, outside of my narrow scope of responsibility. I just do what the work as defined in the story, then go home.
Are we left to conclude that there really weren’t any engineers who thought putting in a system like MCAS, giving it authority to override the pilots, making it dependent on a single AOA sensor, not testing the system under a sensor failure, and not telling pilots or carriers about said system was a really bad idea. Yet we’re 6+ months out, and we’ve heard nothing other than the AOA disagree light issue.
And, the FAA, in the case of the previously mentioned 787 whistleblowers, did not take any real action against Boeing.
I can try and dig up the podcast if anyone is interested.
And I'm skeptical whether there was ever enough certainty with regards to the deadliness of MCAS which could have justified a whistleblower level of personal sacrifice. It's easy for me to believe that people thought it would be good enough, or that at least that no one felt sure that it would fail.
We should treat whistleblowers better, but our safety and regulatory regimes should be designed to function without them.
But in the real-world, everything is shrouded in a level of uncertainty. For most bad scenarios, people are really good at rationalizing why it's not going to happen. Unfortunately, it seems the level of rationalization is directly proportional to their incentives against admitting that bad outcome is a real possibility.
As I understand it, subverting the oversight regimes, allowing Boeing to sign off on their own work, is a big part of this story.
I was a SQA Manager for a while. Every writer needs an editor. It blows my mind that we still believe people can catch their own mistakes.
Source: My neighbor and bestie was a Boeing lifer, mostly working in QC/QA. I get to hear all about this stuff.
I bet that every software engineer encountered such software in their career. Were the engineers that created it incompetent? Perhaps, but more likely is that they were put under pressure to deliver such flawed solutions, and people who said no were replaced with those that said yes no matter what.
I recently watched a documentary about death penalty and how states couldn't get doctors to design the lethal injection because none would agree to work on it. I envy that doctors can have such integrity, but as a group we engineers have very little when money is involved.
Early in my career I asked to not work on a project on ethical grounds, and my manager said “fine, Ted is fine with doing it, so I’ll assign you to a different project!” Years later I actually quit a job partially over objection to some less than ethical uses of the technology, and the boss never even broke a sweat. There were lines of developers out the door willing to replace me.
Software engineering talent is effectively unlimited because we have no professional organization that caps supply, like doctors have. This leads to all kinds of races-to-the-bottom.
Note there is a supply limiter in the form of accreditation and another of typically requiring years of experience too.
There is no such thing as "Software Engineer". You can't get a Professional Engineering license for it, nor can you be sued for not adhering to standards.
The National Society for Professional Engineers (NSPE) was screaming for years that software people should not be allowed to call themselves engineers. They lost that battle, and here we are with your comment. And the all the resulting issues that the NSPE predicted.
> I recently watched a documentary about death penalty and how states couldn't get doctors to design the lethal injection because none would agree to work on it. I envy that doctors can have such integrity, but as a group we engineers have very little when money is involved.
This has nothing to do with integrity and everything to do with the fact that you could lose your medical license.
You would have to offer a doctor enough money to cover the rest of their career, and states are notoriously cheap.
"Indeed, in the aftermath of recent Boeing 737 MAX crashes, the media routinely and positively refers to disclosures by “Boeing whistleblowers.”"
> Indeed, in the aftermath of recent Boeing 737 MAX crashes, the media routinely and positively refers to disclosures by “Boeing whistleblowers.”
So, I guess there are some whistleblowers?
* Moving the engines higher and forward and keeping the same aircraft designation.
* Patching this design change over with software to push forward on the yoke at high AOA.
* Failing to account for AOA sensor failure.
* A bad trim-resetting logic that let MCAS exert almost total authority over the elevators.
* Poor pilot training on these new features
All these things came together to make planes fall out of the sky, I'm not sure if there was any one individual that had the whole picture in their mind.
Probably doesn't meet the standard for whistleblowing though, since it's just censorship by a private company.
Making things 100% efficient and transparent seems like a dystopia with a central world government and no pluralism whatsoever.
Only by raising the general awareness level of the whole population, we can refine tribalism even more by refining the legal and social frameworks.
Chicken and egg problem in its shell.
The world view of engineers isn't particularly important, except to cause them to report something.
“the [engineering] profession must assert itself towards its most magnificent aspirations—for so much of our future is in your trust.”
A lot of information that has come out has likely been lead to by the fact there are people who can tell others where to look, and what questions to ask who aren't bound by any sort of an NDA, or any concerns of getting blackballed by the industry.
That's my guess anyway. A little bit of knowledge, speaking the lingo, and an independent perspective goes a long way toward piercing through the veil of institutional secrecy. The truly arcane is very infrequently the root cause of a severe problem in my experience. Almost every high severity problem results from the seed of problems endemic to the culture that has been architected in a workplace.
If you have a culture that discourages costly non-value adds (and is daft enough to consider Quality/Safety Assurance a non-value add), you're going to have blind spots that will come back to haunt you. Engineers may not find it a naturally comfortable course of action to speak up and hold people accountable, right down to requiring a manager to deliver to you a signed piece of paper swearing that X or Y will not happen because reasons, and it is the decision of <insert manager's name here> that this path of inquiry is not productive enough to follow, for you to then pin your rebuttal to and send up formal chains of authorization; creating that dastardly paper trail that makes everyone squirm.
I don't even pull that one out unless it is something particularly egregious, and at that it would usually only be after getting the ball rolling to bring about a culture change to undo the myopia that has clearly set in already to allow things to degenerate to that point.
Nobody wants to be the bad guy, or think they are working for the bad guy, which makes it d difficult at times to assume the mantle of That Guy, but that's where your people who really do Quality thrive. It doesn't make you super popular or get you invited to fancy parties, but if you stick to it, you'll become one of the most positive forces for change wherever you are.
Until you run into the Liar up the chain of command of course. Then the politics commence, and victory/positive outcomes are not guaranteed.
And Quality people seldom have golden parachutes.
For example, if Boeing categorized MCAS software as 'critical' they may have a process that says any critical software requires redundant inputs. If a business decision was made to avoid redundant inputs on base models, a manager should be signing off on this documenting the associated deviation/risks and why they are acceptable. Woe be the manager who signs off saying they will accept a risk of a plane crash to up-sell a redundant sensor.
This is why we have PE certification: so that projects with safety implications can't go forward if engineers are silent, instead of letting silence imply consent.
Lol no.
If anything it limits the pool of people that can speak up.
I passed the PE, but that has nothing to do with ethics and responsibility. In the end, it's up to the human.
Edit, passed the FE, but that's the hard one.
Unless something has changed since I got my Bachelor's, the FE is the easy one (at least if you take it near graduation).
Sure, that doesn't stop you from doing something unethical. If you get caught, you're either going to have to pay a large fine or change careers. Or go to jail.
Edit: Also, around half the people who take the PE exam fail it. I took the computer engineering exam and breezed through it. If someone failed the same exam I took, I would have serious doubts about their ability to do engineering.
1. I am qualified and able to judge the fitness for purpose and safety of this design. 2. In my estimation it is safe and fit for purpose. 3. I can explain my decision to any of my peers. 4. I am holding myself legally liable for that decision.
I passed the FE too. And I found the civil engineering questions to be pretty easy. But I was only filling up a scantron sheet, not taking charge of human lives.
Yes that's one of the key things I was taught during my engineering degree here is Australia. If you certify something as fit for purpose while acting in the role of a professional engineer you can be held legally liable if you were found to be negligent in performing your duties.
In short we were taught if you are going to sign off on something as being safe and fit for purpose you had better make damn sure of it.
Ethics in general was a big part of my degree (I was at uni in the mid 2000's) there were mandatory course on social responsibility and ethics every year from second year through to fourth year. These included topics on subjects like liability, whistle-blowing and disclosure.
In general I think the large focus engineers have on ethics is a big reason the public has a lot of trust in engineers and engineers regularly rank highly in list of most trusted professions (For example here: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/ranked-australias-20-most...)