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

Classic management failure where they throw the engineers under the bus. This is a textbook example of a high power distance culture. India has an incredibly high power distance, meaning that it is very rare to question those above you and subordinates are expected to execute orders without pushback. Anybody that's worked with offshore/nearshore teams in cost center environments knows exactly what I'm talking about. Such folks are very well meaning but will attempt to execute a ticket exactly as it's written even if what is written is impossible.

In all reality everybody down the food chain knew this was a stupid design but the culture prevented them from speaking up (go ahead, be the nail that gets hammered down! plenty of other people will gladly take your job and do what they are told. explain to your family why you can't put food on the table... or just smile, nod and do what you are told (which is probably some variant of pass that hot potato onto some other poor sap that will in turn do the same thing))

This isn't a blanket statement - there are plenty of Indian engineers I've worked with in real tech companies that are not at all afraid to push boundaries, cause fusses, say no to even the top of the food chain, etc. But the type of environment I'm describing is very different.

The real failure was at the management/political level where the impossible constraints were created, but the cultural dynamic ensured no engineer felt empowered to refuse the task. This is no different than any other case where management throws the engineers under the bus for a mess they caused.

Not acknowledging who is really at fault (hint: not the engineers) plays right into the corrupt politicians who greenlit this in the first thing. You think they were somehow in the dark about the design of this bridge? It doesn’t take a genius engineer to see that shits fucked. Everybody top to bottom knew it.