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Comment by diogenescynic | Hacker News Reader

Go after the executives and management who made the decisions.

Do you think engineers who design the systems also have a duty to the public and should be held accountable?

That’s an interesting question. The engineering ethics course I was required to take would unequivocally say yes, the engineers should be held accountable. If you, as an engineer, raise the concern, and management overrides you, then what? You could whistleblow and/or quit in protest. But does that leave you jobless? My engineering ethics course didn’t talk about duties to support your family financially.

That’s the question I had in a recent engineering law course. It’s clearer IMO when engineering licenses are involved, but most manufacturing (like aerospace) operate under industrial exemptions for PE licenses.

But saying “no, they’ll just be jobless and hire an engineer who’ll rubber stamp it” feels like a cop out to me. Why couldn’t you also extend that further? “no, the board/shareholders will just hire a CEO who prioritizes schedule and profit” fits in the same domain, and nobody is clamoring to hold shareholders accountable.

My personal opinion is that there are a few professions (doctor, lawyer, engineer) who have ethical duties to the public, irrespective of the consequences to their personal career. That’s a legal duty, as opposed to a personal duty to your family.

The company will try to find a a hungry PE to replace the ethical PE.

Now replace “PE” with “CEO” and you have the same dynamic, which is what the previous post was trying to point out.

The question is about who has an ethical duty to the public and how to hold them accountable as such. I’m not sure why it applies only to one group when there’s a reasonable precedent that engineers also have an ethical duty to the public.

In aerospace, the engineers that have responsibility are called delegates, or DERs. It's a step above a PE, but your comment still applies.

The US Congress empowered the SEC with strong whistleblower protections to avoid dilemmas like that.[1]

[1]: https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower/retaliation

Only for securities related fraud and crime. Engineering work doesn't really get covered. I mean with a lot of indirection you can twist that it's lying to shareholders but the SEC wouldn't dare overextend that far without more clearer law.

As Matt Levine says, everything is securities fraud. Boeing defrauded its shareholders (and its public company customers) by saying that it was building safe planes. Even beyond that, the law guarantees protection for whistleblowers within these companies.* These hypothetical engineers would have absolutely been protected.

* If you work for a public company, you've almost certainly had a training about its ethics hotline with information about your protection from retaliation.

I took the same course but frankly don't need an education to know I would never work at a company that is so systematically broken and careless about building safe, quality products. I feel genuinely bad for those who don't feel they have that choice or aren't gutsy enough to make it.

My experience is that people get slowly indoctrinated into thinking it’s ok. They see the pattern over and over and never see a bad outcome just due to the low probability of bad events. It leads people to get complacent, “normalization of deviance” and all that.

I knew a team lead for one of Boeing's machinist groups in Seattle. They were a blue collar bunch and not college educated engineers. He wanted to have pride in their work but was constantly frustrated with their management and told me once that he didn't trust Boeing planes.

Boeing didn't like when they went on strike and moved to South Carolina where it was cheaper and there were less union friendly laws.

I know a lot of Boeing people. Boeing’s management shit-show is legendary around here. The night of the door plug incident a former Boeing coworker of mine very confidently told me his hypothesis of what happened — and he was exactly right when the details came out. He worked there more than ten years ago.

In the case in question here, there is no obvious engineering design flaw in the door plug to hold anyone accountable for. To the point you were replying to, it's also not clear there was an obvious management decision that led to the plug being reinstalled improperly.

I don’t know enough about the door plug, but TFA also implicates the MCAS scenario. In that case, not only were there design flaws, but had the engineers followed their own internal design processes, the flaws could have been mitigated better.

If that’s the case they should also be paid accordingly

I think that’s part of the issue. For example, if you require engineers to have licenses and stamp designs, this gives engineers more leverage for pay. This extends to software engineering as well.

Licensed engineers today don't really get that much benefit in increased pay these days. It's just considered part of the job and it's really your professional liability insurer carrying the most burden and hence your premiums. Lol

If a job requires a PE and not all engineers have a license, that constrains supply. If you believe that the balance of supply/demand influences pay, then it can lead to pay increases. The issue is that most jobs that require PEs are also in industries with lower margins (eg construction). I suspect that if social media software engineers were regulated to require a license, those with a PE would see an increase in pay.

But the public has no duty to the engineer.

The SEC has a whistleblower program to ensure whistleblowers are financially well off after basically getting blacklisted when the industry when they report crimes

There are no such protections for engineers and the aerospace industry is very consolidated these days.

Are there whistleblower protections for medical doctors? Do we use this as a reason to waive any duty the doctor has to the patient?

Those responsible will golden-parachute out and will simply be replaced by similar.

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