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VW Fiasco Puts Ethics In Engineering Under the Spotlight, CEO Steps Down
szczys writes: By now you've heard that VW has been accused of doctoring the software in their small diesel models to sidestep emissions standards. The thing that hasn't been talked about is engineering ethics. An algorithm in the code detects when the vehicle is under test conditions and causes it to perform differently. This couldn't have been accomplished by just one person. Brian Benchoff looks at the conditions leading up to the scandal and discusses the engineering ethics involved. Automotive engineers are held to a higher standard because mistakes and cut corners can kill people. This kind of suspected deceit goes well beyond concerns of environmental damage. Willing ethics violations challenge our trust of the engineering as a whole. Volkswagen‘s chief executive Martin Winterkorn has announced he is stepping down.
This was a financial decision, pure and simple. Someone in a suit decided it would be more profitable to hide non-compliance, rather than spend the resourcing fixing the problem *with* proper engineering.
The issue is probably not foreign vs non-foreign. I think ZeroHedge probably gets it right: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/...
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
And the manager said, "You're fired."
We must be naive to think only one car company does this.
The mileage I get from my car are not as good as what my dashboard say and I don't have a VW.
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Sometimes people don't see things as unethical. It wouldn't surprise me if all the engineers thought, "stupid Americans and their regulations......we know how to make an engine that is clean enough."
For comparison, it might be unethical to work in the advertising industry. You're mainly just showing ads that annoy people, and you're also giving them malware. It might also be unethical to build weapons of war. A lot of what bankers do is unethical.
Yet people in all those industries have their own justification to explain why it's ok to work on those products. When I worked in ad-tech, I would ask a lot of my coworkers how they felt about it, and they had different justifications, but everyone had one. I'm not trying to condemn them here, just pointing out that what one person considers unethical, another feels perfectly fine with.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
All they have to do is buy a Senator or Presidential Candidate to rail against "job crushing regulations within the industry", and immediately propose removal of all regulations for cars.
Hell, cars can come out of the factory without even seatbelts. Or wheels. Because it would stimulate the economy.
Either that, or they would work hard to get the law changed so that what VW did was perfectly legal. After all, that's how the financial industry works. Credit Default Swaps? Still entirely legal.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Now begins the testing of all vehicles' claims; it makes you wonder what will be dug up in the next few months. Odds of this being isolated to VW, low.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
SOME computer software should be "signed off on" by a licensed professional who is subject to the same kinds of professional sanctions as engineers are if they behave unethically.
I'm mainly thinking pacemaker- and other medical-device-firmware but I would throw air-bag and other auto-safety-system software in there as well. You sign off on pacemaker software where corners were cut and someone dies or their health is endangered, YOU should get your license sanctioned or revoked, even if you did it at your employer's behest, just like if a civil engineer signed off on a sub-standard bridge design or inspection because his employer pressured him to do so.
As for software engineers who write engine pollution control software, where nobody gets seriously injured or killed (at least not immediately *coughwheezegaspithoughtwewereinkansasnotbeijing*), they should certainly behave ethically but the purpose of professional licensing is to protect the public safety and the client (in this case, the car company) from financial abuse by the professional (in this case the employee). It is not to protect the car-buying public from being ripped off by the car company lying through their teeth. We've got other forms of government regulation and civil and criminal courts to address those issues.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Nobody ever said, "go forth and flaunt the law" maybe $Engineer did not even realize what he was doing violated the testing rules.
I have spent a good portion of my career as an engineer in the automotive industry. There is NO WAY the engineers doing this were not fully aware that what they were doing was in violation of the law. To program this they would have to be aware of what the rules were and so they cannot argue that they didn't realize what they were doing. They weren't stupid, they weren't naive. They knew exactly what they were doing at the time they did it.
No, this was a deliberate fraud. Probably ordered by management but executed and carried out by engineers who damn well knew or should have known what they were doing was illegal as hell.
It seems to me that at least some of this finger pointing should go towards the idiots who created the circumstance where the item under test was informed it was under test. That presumes an atmosphere of trust that the very idea of "testing for compliance" does not, and should not, incorporate.
I'm not saying VW is blameless in this, or making any statement about the consequences to society or lack thereof. I'm just saying someone, or more than one someone, is culpable as having set up the circumstances where this could even happen.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Your boss tells you to do something, you refuse to do it, you get fired and they get someone else to do what they want anyway.
If your boss is ordering you to do something that you damn well know is illegal then you should refuse. If they want to fire you for that then so be it. This is not a complicated scenario. Having a family to feed is not adequate justification for fraud and frankly weren't not talking about the sort of workers who cannot ever get another job. These are well paid engineers with options.
it was the decision of someone in a suit, not the author(s) of the code in question.
Bullshit. That's the "I was just following orders" defense. The order may have come from up high but the decision to execute that illegal order makes the engineers every bit as culpable. The guy executing the crime is just as guilty as the guy who plans the crime.
There might not be a 'proper engineering' solution to the emissions problem.
That's not an excuse to commit fraud even if true.
...
Something is seriously messed up there.
There is indeed. It is the fruit of corporate lobbying.
Domestic vehicle makers have maintained a relative advantage in the SUV and sport truck marketplaces, practically alone among all vehicle categories. They also (not surprisingly) have their highest profit margins on these vehicles. Accordingly they have worked hard to make sure that special favors to promote those vehicle categories are written into law. The regulatory-industry turnstile ensures that favorable interpretations by (soon to be industry consultant) regulators.
Some years back there was actually a tax credit for heavy SUVs and trucks, which were classified automatically as "commercial vehicles" which in turn got an automatic "commercial vehicle purchase" tax credit without needing any showing of commercial use so that the tax payer was subsidizing the sale of gas guzzling toys to the well off (but they were American! toys.)
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