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Comment by derwiki | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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