In this case, being fired was an ideal outcome.
Being fired was an ideal outcome for Lochridge, because Lochridge was therefore not piloting the sub this week.
I'm pretty sure he does not set the utility of other peoples' lives at 0, so their surviving along with him would definitely be better.
So this has to be the second-best outcome at best.
What outcome is ideal depends on the priors, I suppose.
If the company not listening to Lochridge is a given, then being fired is better than not, and having to go down on the sub.
The company listening to Lochridge is better than the company not listening to Lochridge.
The company putting safety first and engineering something that met Lochridge's standards from the outset is better than the company listening to Lochridge when he brought up problems. And so on.
You cannot ensure its safety, since you cannot evaluate it for growing defects. As is best practice for all other DSVs in the world that use metal pressure hulls.
I suspect a metal hull and all it entails (way more complex design and careful selection of materials, equipment, passenger space etc.) would have cost too much.
What an absurd thing to say. Not having the sub sink has all the upsides and none of the downsides of having it sink. Ergo, being fired is guaranteed not to be optimal.
I also suspect that if you go with a metal hull, you don't have positive buoancy anymore - you need syntactic foam. You need larger thrusters, those are heavier too, so more foam etc.
The engineering becomes harder and also costlier, in addition to the material and equipment costs.
What you gain is the ability to evaluate your pressure vessel for growing defects - which you didn't do in the first place (and can't do) with your composite hull.
See theranos and others. We really need to address this
How do you separate the legit concerns from someone complaining that they can't go to work because their yellow safety vest is slightly dirty and therefore not safe anymore?
All proper engineering companies have integrity and compliance processes, whistleblower systems, confidante contacts, etc.
It's good business to do this. Fucking up kills people, and liability kills companies.
Mature companies develop code to intentionally dodge regulations. They're not trustworthy regardless of "maturity".
Otherwise they are more like a safety consultant.
I'm assuming people have been extracting it, but alas, I'm out of the edit window.
I think to a somewhat lesser extent (HN is particularly aggressively anti-whistleblower) this is the general attitude, unfortunately.
This worker likely blew the whistle on the safety assessment of the system.
Sometimes, external forces see product to market despite risks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...