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Comment by elmin | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't be so quick to blame the engineers. They might be working within a managerial structure which doesn't give them the latitude they need to do their jobs. Yes engineers have a duty, but in software it's often hard to know exactly what the impact of cruft will be, and often all you can do is quit.

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I agree, but I also believe that as an engineer I have an duty to refuse to build something under conditions that, once built, would cause harm to others. Or at least to relay my concerns to management in writing before proceeding.

And sometimes, quitting is the ethical thing to do.

Quitting certainly is the ethical thing to do. I wonder if I'd quit if I was in their position.

Handing your concerns to management in writing isn't really a done thing in this culture. I sometimes get laughed at for even suggesting it. And people who quit often take a massive pay cut, are forced into contract work with no safety, or even don't ever get hired in software again - especially in Nagoya where everyone seems to knows everyone.

And when you have a family and a mortgage to pay (selling a house here is also a guaranteed massive loss), it can realistically be a choice between you and your family on the street or doing what you're told.

While the engineers aren't blameless, the system over here is really broken.

    people who quit often take a massive pay cut, 
    are forced into contract work with no safety

Is this due to the salaryman culture in Japan? I'd probably have a heart attack if I had to work under that kind of work culture.

I don't know about heart attacks, but Japan has pretty high suicide rate.

But what if you have a life. And dependents. And bills to pay.

As much as I would like to agree with you, people have different value systems. And money talks. So quitting isn't always an option, even though it is the most ethical. Can't pay the bills with ethics.

> So quitting isn't always an option, even though it is the most ethical.

If you think quitting a dangerous project (to be replaced by another dime-a-dozen engineer by a large corporation which employs thousands) is the ethically correct choice, your moral compass is broken.

We're talking about a device sold in the millions of units that is capable of dealing great bodily and structural harm to us and our world around us.

Whistle blowing (preferably before real world harm) is the only ethical choice for someone that is made aware of such a situation.

Then you probably should not be taking on work that human lives depend on. Placing my bills over someone else's bills is a perfectly human reaction. But placing my bills over someone else's life -- a typical human should not feel this way.

This is a systemic problem though, not a problem with the ethics of the engineers. Systems that incentivize bad behavior are to blame.

Unless you're living without luxuries then you are prioritizing your access to luxuries over the lives of others. That's unconscionable, even if you word it as "bills to pay and mouths to feed".

If you're working as an engineer for Toyota's firmware it's unlikely that you won't be able to find sufficiently well paying work to keep the kids in clothes and food and keep a roof over your head.

And, at large Japanese companies, people are shuffled around every two years. I had heard this and didn't believe it until I saw it. A distributor of my company would replace people with novices once the previous person had just gotten really good at the job.

If Toyota is doing this, it would explain a lot.

Blow the whistle? Contact regulatory agencies?

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