Because that’s how this will go.
Of course I want the entire chain of those involved criminally punished but punishing people anywhere on that chain, even those at the bottom is a start.
With a no-fault system, mistakes are not covered up, but fixed.
With a fault system:
1. if a mistake is discovered, it will not be fixed because that would be an admission of criminal liability.
2. Quality will not be improved, because that is (again) an implicit admission that the previous design was faulty.
3. You won't get new airplane designs, because (again) any new design is an inherent risk.
I understand the desire for revenge, but there are heavy negative consequences for a revenge/punishment/fear based system.
P.S. I worked at Boeing on the 757 stabilizer trim system. At one point, I knew everything there was to know about it. It was a safety critical system. I did a lot of the double checking of other peoples' work on it.
I did not work in an atmosphere of fear.
The 757 in service proved an extremely reliable airplane. I've flown commercial on many 757s, and often would chat a bit with the flight crew. They were unanimous in their admiration for the airplane. Made me feel pretty good.
The NTSB does not assign fault or blame for an accident or incident; rather, as specified by NTSB regulation, “accident/incident investigations are fact-finding proceedings with no formal issues and no adverse parties … and are not conducted for the purpose of determining the rights or liabilities of any person”
But there was plenty of blaming / faulting going around outside of the NTSB. Hence the fraud we're currently talking about where Boeing tried to blame the pilots who rather conveniently for Boeing died and are no longer around to defend themselves.
I'm glad you feel personally assured though your enthusiastic personal connections but that does not work for me. That it works for you actually makes me feel less safe flying.
Yes
But it will be much more effective if the managers risk jail
Engineers often need the money and simply cannot quit like thar
As engineers we are often responsible for the creation of assets more valuable than ourselves and I think it's an essential part of the job to put our lives on the line in much the same way an airplane passenger does. And as engineers we are often also airplane passengers ourselves and must trust that other engineers that they too have put our safety ahead of their personal wellbeing.
As the middle class is crushed then sure, such ethical boundaries will fade out of necessity, and I see this as part of a descent into a low trust society and why I expect more planes to fall out of the sky, both metaphorically and literally. Once a culture tolerates such flexible ethics the boundaries will continue being pushed - there isn't a lower bound. This corruption inhibits the creation of valuable assets and will result in a massive erosion of our standard of living.
An often touted solution is Universal basic income (UBI) that would create a safety-net for engineers and those with my type of disability - but having experienced constant gaslighting on ME/CFS from doctors informed by state funded research and given the expansion of Canadian MAID style solutions to people like myself I'm very fortunate that the capitalists opportunities existed such that I did not have to rely on state 'care'.
We are literally the last line of defense in a lot of industries. From the first line of the ASME code of ethics:
> Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public in the performance of their professional duties.
If you can't do that, you should be in another field. Maybe software engineering at Meta would be a better fit.
This is such an important part of engineering as a profession.
However a huge number of engineers critical to safety would not have one.
Also the personal insult is not needed. It just makes you out to be an ass rather than someone making a point.
Consider your romantic notions might not be realistic.
To a certain extent this is true. To extend the OP's example, a mechanical or civil engineer who stamps a building design takes responsibility for that design being safe enough for public use. The same could apply to the MCAS design, or the quality engineer who signs off on how the plane was put together. These are not "romatic notions"; the latter is already common practice in aerospace. Do you think if a QE stamped that the door bolts were installed should not bear responsibility for the bolts being missing?
In those cases where the engineer is supposed to be aware of the risks, there should be processes in place to account for, and mitigate, those risks. For the example of MCAS, the software was categorized as hazardous in the hazard analysis document. As such, Boeing processes required it to have redundant inputs as a default. It did not (the redundant sensor was sold an optional equipment); as such, I think the engineer who signed off on the hazard analysis may bear some responsibility. If, on the other hand, there were no business processes in place to require redundancy, that seems like a CEO responsibility.
It's true that most software engineers never work on safety-critical systems. The nature of the products they work on, or the nature of their contributions to those products, limits the possible impact of flaws and mistakes.
Once you work on a product with safety-critical features and/or become responsible for one, there really is a marked psychological change that takes place. I've lived through that change in my own career, and many comments (including some I've written, I'm sure) now strike me as callous and trivializing important matters to an extent that grates.
It's important to hold engineers accountable for their work in proportion to their impact, which is typically very significant. If you build machines that can kill, stakes should exist for you as well.
When I worked at a retailer, we were told to push buy-now-pay-later schemes on our customers (on top of the corporate credit card, and insurance plans, and service plans). Most of my coworkers simply decided that they weren't going to - in part, because such schemes are nakedly predatory, but also because it was yet another dumb metric we knew we'd be held to if it were successful. I don't know of anyone who was fired or docked pay or denied a promotion because of it, and it's not worth luring someone into financial ruin over a TV and an entry-level sales position. Which leads me to another thought: if you're so low in the chain that you have no say in how and what you work on, is it a job that's worth sacrificing your morals for? Maybe take advantage of that increased earnings potential from job-hopping and get out of dodge.
In the building sector you can't build without your design being signed of by an engineering office and the engineer and its office take the responsability for it, both at the criminal and civil level.
If the same rule existed for the software industry, the organisation would adapt itself around it.
Project documentation also not a new concept. Also acceptable.
There has been a movement in some states to remove the manufacturing exemption, in which case the cognizant engineer would bear the responsibility. The optimistic view is that this will help balance the power between the engineer and the C-suite. The cynical view is that this will allow the C-suite to push responsibility down to the engineer.
In fairness, he was an exec making $7M per year - so not a nobody, but he was only managing 70 people (Credit Suisse was a ~50k person company), and obviously not the only person who should've went to jail.
And don't give me the Yuppie Nuremberg Defense. "I was just following orders... because I've got a mortgage!" That doesn't fly when lives are on the line.
How did you jump to engineering directly from this sentence?
