Seven Engineers Suspended After $2.3M Bridge Includes 90-Degree Turn

Have you never worked on projects where the management wants to do things a certain way but you know it’s just plain wrong. The only option sometimes is to let the slow rolling disaster unfold or risk your own job. Obviously this only applies where you aren’t risking people’s lives, but there is an entire subreddit dedicated for this. (r/maliciouscompliance)

Part of the problem with the insane cost of living in first world countries is that saying no often means you probably don't get to live inside for the next few months. It tends to turn engineers into yes men.

The ones who plan ahead tend to not end up in these organizations to begin with since they have leeway to say no much earlier.

This comes up all the time on HN about terrible, failed software projects, and the same excuses get brought up. "But engineers are forced to build it!" "It's really the Manager's fault!" "It's really the PM's fault!"

The job of an Engineer implies a capacity for technical judgment and willingness to not do something if it's unsafe or doesn't make sense. Even if we're not official, licensed "Professional Engineers," we still need to make these calls and stop projects like this from happening. Whether it's building a ridiculous, unsafe bridge, or building ridiculous, defective software, if the engineer doesn't have the agency to stop it, who does?

Just letting it happen and letting it fail with a "malicious compliance" smirk on our faces is passive aggressive, and doesn't elevate our profession.

The day landlords start accepting "integrity" and "elevating the profession" as payment for the rent is the day that engineers will do what you're saying.

The only way to make this kind of thing work is by threatening to send people to jail. Like building-engineers having to report asbestos, or electricians being forced to report code violations and authorities actually following up on it. Of course regulation is like kryptonite for the engineering/HN crowd, so let's keep building shit on thoughts and prayers.

> The day landlords start accepting "integrity" and "elevating the profession" as payment for the rent is the day that engineers will do what you're saying.

i don't think that's necessarily the case. civil engineering implies personal responsibility. we get to pretend like our bad choices don't have real-world impacts because we don't have a universal standards board or mandated ethical guidelines for computer engineering (in the vast majority of cases).

You answered this yourself. We’re not talking consumer products. We’re talking civil engineering for bridges. You also can’t just ship medical device software with no basic testing that could injure people in the software world. If someone asked me to ship regardless I’d get it in writing and ensure my objections were clearly stated and also in writing.

But you’d still ship… and that’s my point.

Also, depending on the org, you may or may not come out unscathed on the other side.

Sounds good, but doesn’t work. I still have bills to pay and a family to feed. If the cost of saying no is that I lose my job or get put in the doghouse without a promotion because a person with more influence got upset, I will put up with it and do whatever is asked of me. I may leave the company later if I find another job and they might also find another person to replace me, but that project is moving forward one way or the other.

Again, if I’m being asked to risk people’s lives, I’d push back harder and resign if I can’t change minds, but I’m not doing any of that to “elevate our profession”.

A soldier in combat deals with life or death in ways which are far more direct than a Boeing aircraft sometimes having its door blown off. Soldiers in combat may choose for people to die as a product of moral vision, not accidents.

But we all know the reality of whether we expect moral pushback from the armed forces for just about anything.

Was it a good deal when hundreds of thousands of bystanders died in Iraq? It doesn't matter. It's not the place of the rank and file to question authority, regardless of constitution this or moral that. The same is true for rank and file engineers.

You just repeated my example. GP was talking about software. Even you are. As I already said, Civil Engineers have responsibilities either because of regulation and professional guilds, not because they just "want to elevate the profession".

As long as software engineers can be fired for denying to do things asked by people in power, "standards" and "ethics" take second place. This applies to virtually every profession, so maybe start making bad bosses and bad managers take actual responsibility for their irresponsibility before blaming on engineers.

In life there is no responsibility when there is no autonomy. And as much as certain crowds love to say "just walk way", giving away your means of survival is also not real autonomy. This is not WW2.