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Comment by woeirua | Hacker News Reader

When the shit starts flying, the execs and marketing team are absolutely going to throw the engineers under the bus. "We were just repeating what we were told by the engineers." "We didn't know any better."

It happens every time. The best defense for the engineers is to have thoroughly documented the limitations of the system.

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All of those limitations are documented and are even published in the owners manual, among other things. "Nobody told us" doesn't hold water in this scenario. Musk knows exactly what his car can and can't do, but he sells it with misleading marketing anyway.

There is a character that is a wonderful example in this category in "Going Postal" by Terry Pratchett - I'd suggest reading the whole book because it's fantastic but in particular Mr. Pony is the epitome of the pressed on engineer

> Pony looked around, a hunted man. He’d got his pink carbon copies, and they would show everyone that he was nothing more than a man who’d tried to make things work, but right now all he could find on his side was the truth. He took refuge in it.

Do you have an example where an engineer was wrongly held to account for the actions of execs?

Not exactly the same thing, but Boeing certainly tried to throw Mark Forkner under the bus.

It's not a crime to have poor safety culture, but poor safety culture causes crimes to happen.

That is, you may induce your employees to commit crimes, while not personally violating any laws.

Or your employees may commit crimes because middle management thought it was more important to hit their targets.

There is an obvious moral conflict here; the laws have not caught up to the complexity of corporate culture.

But in this particular case, the guy at the helm (CEO and marketing), i.e. Musk, is also an engineer…

> It happens every time.

Citation needed please

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