Okay, so it's okay to go after an engineer at VW for gaming the system, and causing higher emissions than everyone thought, but not okay to go after bankers for fraud which screwed the world economy?
I'm not saying that the engineer shouldn't be responsible - he should - but it's an extreme double standard.
Non-flippant answer, in case this question is genuine: there are no laws against what any individual banker did, or else there is insufficient evidence to prosecute the bankers under any law they hypothetically broke. Not so with this engineer.
Is it a good enough reason though? That would depend on the likelihood of losing your job by refusing, the ease of finding a different job, the seriousness of the unethical request, and the likelihood of getting caught.
Extracting the maximum value from their employees is a core competence of most automotive companies. With no union to protect them, naive low ranking software engineers are exceedingly vulnerable to aggression and abuse from their line manager, It is hardly surprising that the resulting culture is one which rewards dishonesty and fraud above all else.
That’s certainly true. Deterrence is one of the classic justifications for punishment (and for crimes like this that don’t involve direct violence or specific victims, it’s perhaps the best or most significant justification). But still, the strength of the deterrence is related not just to the specific punishment, but also the likelihood of being caught. I don’t have any data to back this up, but my intuition is that crimes like this of this magnitude are very difficult and thus unlikely to discover and successfully prosecute, especially down to the level of specific engineers. My guess is that this whole situation will provide some deterrence at the large corporation level, but probably not much deterrence at the individual engineer level.
So? It sucks to be in such a bind, but nothing says life is always easy or fair. The best you can do is to do the right thing and hope things are better at the next firm.
When the option is do something unethical for work or run out of money and be unable to pay rent, pay for kids’ food, medicine, etc., I wouldn’t think twice about doing what my boss asked.
I clarified that it applied when you see the person as an authority figure as it pertains to obedience of said authority figure. Your comment is completely spurious.
We are talking about engineers here, supposedly one of the best occupations you can have. This is not about poor starving without education and no choice.
Seriosly, there is more emphaty for people who can find another job real quick (or just need to be content to not climb career ladder) then for poor-about-to-be-homeless that does something unethical.
When asked why you were fired, being able to say "I was asked to do something illegal or unethical" is a strong response. That certainly helps with the "find a new job" part.
I'd suggest you drop the "or unethical" part if you're actually going to actually use this. The law is a fair amount more objective (still lots of subjectivity but it's not perceived to be as subjective) whereas personal ethical standards are extremely subjective (and perceived that way). Many companies see the former as 'I don't want to break the law and go to jail' and the latter as 'I get to impose my personal standard of ethics on all my bosses and the entire company and if they don't like it I'll throw a fit and quit in the middle of a critical project while accusing them of being monsters.' If you can add the word repeatedly, it might help. It suggests you wouldn't do something illegal but wouldn't quit if someone asked you once (possibly by mistake not knowing it was illegal) but if you get asked again after you clarified it was illegal and you wouldn't do it and they wanted you to do it anyway that leads to you quitting.
It actually does not help to say this answer, it would go over badly in 95% of interviews no matter how egregious the unethical request. The interviewer typically questions if you're being truthful and if they will be accused of the same in the future. When I worked as an agent, we generally coached people to state one of the other reasons they quit or were fired and if ever asked the interview question "Have you ever been asked to do something illegal or unethical?" to just answer "No."
The only time you're allowed to mention this is when it becomes easily verifiable in something like a newspaper. I actually have personal experience in one of my jobs where the owners very casually asked me to do some unethical things and then shrugged it off. At the time I highly suspected I was fired because of it, but had no evidence. So for years at interviews when asked why I was fired, my answer was "Nepotism," which is true because they replaced me with an incompetent relative. The FTC shut them down 5 years after I was fired. I only mention it if the employer tries to verify past employment and asks why the phone number doesn't work.
I would tend to agree with this. Many top managers want people who will do dirty work for them if told to, especially in the usual case where they themselves are at little risk from prosecution themselves. Particularly in certain fields like finance, a strong sense of morality or ethics would be perceived as a serious liability.
> Particularly in certain fields like finance, a strong sense of morality or ethics would be perceived as a serious liability.
I read an article which claimed that if you want a job as a car salesperson, you should make it clear that the reason you want the job is that you want to make the most money you can, not that you have a passion for cars. Don't know how true this assertion is but the rest of the article seems to corroborate. There were anecdotes which mentioned the dealership getting a decent kickback from the manufacturer for selling say 80 cars (and the prospect of getting nothing for selling 79) which could mean the difference between the dealership being in the red versus being in the black. Given these constraints, you don't want to hire someone who does the right thing and turns away prospective customers based on what is in the customer's best interest. I can imagine similar pressure to bank tellers at places like Wells Fargo (whose ex CEO should be in prison btw)
On the other hand, you could always respond by saying: I expect not to be asked to do something illegal; I have no interest in working for such a company. However, I have high expectations of you, and that's why I believe I can be fully loyal to you.
Could? sure. Should you expect it? If so, then the industry you work in is systemically corrupt.
I and a co-interviewer recently voted "strong yes" for a candidate partly on the basis of hearing that he took a hard line against giving his CEO access to the text of conversations on a messaging platform.
"I am absolutely going to be loyal to Corpco and its best interests. If I am so much as arrested for my work, regardless of how the trial goes, I can't work for Corpco. If I do something that causes an investigation into Corpco, I will be hurting the company. I left Donoevil because I saw that if I stayed, it would be bad for the company, and I didn't want to be part of that - I wouldn't be showing the loyalty I promised the company. I'm proud of my decision and I wish all the best success to Donoevil."
So every boss now knows that as long as they can find somebody in lower place to agree to do something unethical, they will face no repercussions themselves!
That depends highly on the local employment laws. In Germany being fired for refusing illegal or unethical tasks screams for unlawful termination. That means a court case, which means the unethical request will become public knowledge. That's a huge thread even if the employer wins in court.
Here your job would be safe, though you could be put in some dead-end position where you eventually leave on your own. Or you are offered a good deal for leaving quietly.
Fantastic indeed. For decades us engineers have been blaming the bosses for the unethical shit we pull. Fuck that shit. Be civilized for a change. Don't make evil tech.
This has nothing to do with nationality. Everywhere and up to this day people excuse themselves that they are just doing what they were told/forced to. Snowden is sadly the rare exception, rather than the rule.
Volkswagen is actually a prime example of German corporate culture. At least in stock listed companies in Germany this seems to be common, since Germany lacks in laws that would execute an appropriate punishment.
Germans in general, this example notwithstanding, have learned that lesson, it's the rest of the world that still needs to learn it as well as they did.
yea, but we're not talking about the rest of the world in this thread, are we? also seems a little misguided to defend to a generalization with another generalization. no?
While the article does mention one more guy (Oliver Schmidt), it's a shame they just put the whole thing on this Engineer, when in reality there is no way this could have been pulled off by two people without the rest of management's knowledge/approval.
Are you seriously telling me that only this single guy was responsible for all the emissions that were found in the TDI range of diesels, all the way from A3 to A8? Sorry, I'm not buying it.
This is a common sentiment here on HN, and it is entirely devoid of factual grounding.
This is one guy who happened to travel to the USA (stupid move: asking US authorities before travelling "hey, are you going to arrest me?" and taking their word that no, they don't plan to…). Another American VW guy has already been sentenced.
The "real culprits" are all living in Germany. And the investigation in Germany is ongoing. It may not make a splash in the US press, but there have been raids at VW offices and in managers' private homes.
Former CEO Martin Winterkorn is amongst the now thirty-seven people investigated (so it is certainly not the case that German prosecutors focus on a few lowly engineers as "fall guys", as HN commenteers love to claim).
The investigation is ongoing, and it is generally expected that there will be criminal charges. But this takes time.
VW and the German government are basically "cooperating" on everything [1] [2] [3]. It's extremely naive to think that VW will get a fair trail in Germany.
The German government doesn't control the prosecution. Especially not because it's not a federal investigation. Criminal matters are state matters, with very few exceptions.
And to counter your next try: No, the government of Lower Saxony does not control the prosecution either.
government doesn't control the prosecution but government makes the laws and regulations. that's enough. And government in Germany is super cozy [1] [2] with car makers.
Last time I checked the prosecution was bound by instructions (§ 147 GVG), in this case by the government of Lower Saxony. Of course there are some limits to this and I'm not saying anything like that happened here.
The guy lead the emission compliance unit in the US. He was most likely in charge of taking the software designed in Germany and adapting it so that it works with the emission tests performed in the US. As far as I can remember, the software was pretty closely monitoring the driving style and comparing it to the test suite that was performed in the EU in order to activate the cheats. They probably had to perform the same kind of thing in the US, as I assume that the tests differ.
And QA engineers or security reviewers never detected this in the source code? I would love to see how many people participated in those source code repositories.
Except, they don't work with actual source code. An engineering team responsible for adaptation for certain market, most likely works in calibration space, that's it, just data (flags, thresholds and tables, thousands of them). To access this data they rely on ASAP2 description databases which are simply very large text files [1] containing ROM addresses, parameter names, etc. I don't know the whole VW workflow, but can imagine how one could define a set of switching parameters for cheating, and then delete their definitions, leaving these parameters invisible.
Nope, the articles says there are 7 more higher ranking executives due to be judged. And from the looks of it their sentences might be significantly higher as well.
The article implies other executives to be sentenced. Liang happens to be the lowest ranking executive. Also from the looks of Schmidt’s sentencing it seems the orher executives probably had longer sentences.
I don't disagree that some of the executives should be face similar, perhaps even harsher, sentences, but just "following orders," even under "duress" does not relieve a person of responsibility for their actions. Someone telling you to do something illegal does not suddenly make it legal.
Ethics is a big deal in many engineering disciplines, and breaking those ethical codes can cost your your license in addition to facing legal consequences.
"U.S. prosecutors have charged eight current and former Volkswagen executives in connection with the diesel emissions cheating probe. Liang is one of the lowest-ranking executives charged so far."
Who said it was his job on the line if he didn't? Quite frankly, it was his choice to engineer the cheat, whether he was ordered to by threat of employment or not.
Is it even possible to attribute a death to single, specific cause like pollution? What is the median age of these deaths? How did they happen? Do certain occupations make people more vulnerable to pollution exposure?
Nobody's attributing deaths to single causes. When we say e.g. that coal plants kill N number of people per year it's not the case that someone breathed in some coal particulates and keeled over night there at the age of 20.
Rather, we know from epidemiological data that certain pollution, foods etc. shorten your life by a given amount. Let's say life expectancy is 100 years, living near a coal plant subtracts 5 years from that, and living near a nuclear plant 0. That would mean that out of 20 people living there there was 1 death equivalent a year.
Other times, people measure life in "quality-adjusted years". So a coal plant that kills a young person every 20 years is worse than one that kills 78-year-olds regularly. This is a more rigorous method, measuring quality*years instead of deaths, which is why you almost never see it in activist claims. It's too rigorous to be manipulated.
Other times, people just look at the immediate cause of death (e.g. lung cancer) and extrapolate to the cause of that cause (e.g. air pollution). But this imports a lot of assumptions and is easy to game. For example, I've seen cases where hundreds of thousands of deaths have been attributed to a given cause, but it turns out that those people were dying just a few years short of average life expectancy, and would've died for other reasons very soon regardless - quite different from the image of people in their prime dying needlessly.
It's good to question these figures. As they are currently presented, we don't know the methodology, which makes them meaningless.
>You have to consider ethics in your work as an Engineer. Refusing an unethical task is your moral duty.
It's easy to say, but ethics isn´t always so black and white. What about yourself. Do you drive a car? Then you are guilty of contributing to the air pollution that kills 200,000 in the US ever year, and you also endanger others' life by participating in traffic and making it more dangerous. You are also contributing to sponsoring the salaries of the car industry overall, which means you are indirectly sponsoring the development of more lethal machines, which also by the way enables murderers to transport themselves more rapidly to their victims.
Did you post a helpful comment on HN or stackoverflow, and this comment helped a programmer in North Korea to develop their nuclear weapons just a little bit further, is that ethical?
You have to consider ethics, but an "unethical task" depends so much on context.
I think there is a major difference in butterfly effect scenarios and intentionally misleading and commiting fraud. It's why mens rea is part of the equation for judgement. Intent means a lot; if it weren't, we wouldn't differentiate between manslaughter and murder.
The VW engineers intentionally designed a system meant to defraud tests and avoid regulations, misleading consumers and regulators about the product. This was an order from on high, I dont doubt, but it's still an intentiknal decision. I do this knowing the direct result is fraud and pollution. My intent is to commit fraud, and I do not care about the side effect of pollution. And it's not really possible to not know what the intent of such a system is.
I think we do need to be aware of the impact of our decisions and our choices, and we cannot just dismiss unethical choices on the basis of "everything could be bad.". That's just eschewing responsibility.
The engineering management team is pretty good at making sure that such orders are almost never given explicitly. If they absolutely must to be given explicitly, then they are never ever given in writing. Most of the time, though, they don't need to be.
All you need to do is to create a culture where even the smallest failure is not acceptable, where employees are regularly abused by aggressive managers; where individuals are put under immense pressure to achieve the impossible, and where questions about how those results were achieved are simply not asked.
There is an unrelenting pressure to conform; to demonstrate outstanding results; to make it look like everything is running smoothly, and to hide failings and faults, even if that means lying to your manager, lying to your customers, lying to your colleagues, lying to everyone.
I have seen project managers lie in the most brazen way to customers and to auditors. I have seen more than one test engineer who would rather fake a test passing than show that the product does not work.
The automotive industry is to a large extent a moral vacuum, and there are dozens if not hundreds of managers and engineers across the industry who should by rights be behind bars and by whose continued freedom we not only damage the moral fabric of an industry, but also endanger the health and safety of innocent people all around the world.
What you describe is true and makes it harder to prosecute the management. That does not excuse individual engineers for effectively their own decisions.
Leaving such company or not having much career is ethically much higher then participating at fraud. And engineers do such decisions and earn less money because they did such decisions.
Another contributing factor is larger culture that treats such people as losers or "makers of excuses" for lesser success and excuses or celebrates those who merely did not get caught.
Thankfully, the company that I work for now is entirely different: my colleagues are a truly exemplary bunch of people, and working with them is a joy.
I find that the rule "you are always responsible for bad outcomes in proportion to your ability to prevent them" to be a fairly straightforward principle.
And from that rule we are of course all guilty but some are more guilty than others. I assume I'm kind of stating obvious stuff though?
The context was pretty clear here. This particular engineer got asked to do something he knew was unethical and he did it anyway. That is pretty black on white to me.
Consumer behaviour is an entirely different thing.
Yes ... but as engineers we need to support the professional organisations that in turn will support us when we need to make these difficult and politically courageous decisions.
Without putting words into w_t_payne's mouth (and at risk of incurring the ire of HNers who are wary of them), unions would be one such form of organization.
Other such organizations might include software engineering guilds but I don't think such guilds generally act to protect the interests of software engineers collectively or individually.
For various historical and professional reasons, software developers have not seriously considered unionization as a means of advancing their interests. However, unions typically do protect their members from arbitrary and unfair work termination.
YMMV
EDIT: change indirect object of first sentence in last paragraph.
The numbers really vary by source, and the vast majority who do die from air pollution were already on deaths door and it can be blamed for taking a few days to months at most.
Unfortunately I think most people will conclude that this kind of enforcement only applies to non-US companies. I guess people from the US might start worrying about travel to the EU though.
... which is kind of weird, considering they promised low emission cars since the 1980s and have not been able to deliver on that.
And now all of a sudden the invest marginal sums (lower than what gets invested for new car models usually) to make electric cars work, and suddenly bankers think they'll make it work?
The problem I find with the whole episode is that it would be incredibly naive to think that only VW cheats the emission tests (as apparently also evidenced by the recent news that Fiat Chrysler also did it, with likely many other carmakers doing it as well. There was also news about Samsung cheating the emission tests on their electronic products, but that made no splash whatsoever). Though all the provisions for fining VW and sentencing those guys are theoretically sound in legal terms, I can't help but feel it highly political, just like the EU's crackdown and fines on Google, Microsoft etc. There's basically an implicit trade war and accompanying trade protectionism going on.
So good, that they do strong punishments, but maybe don't stop with VW, as others apparently do the same now (or working on it to put it silently under the carpet). Which makes me wonder if there is some backdoor agreement, that VW gets the public shame now, but recieves funding/legal aid, etc. from other companies as they are all involved in this and they don't want VW do the aggressive defense, of "everybody else is doing it as well" ...
This is a baseless conspiracy theory. Cheating is not par for the course, it was shocking to the emissions compliance community that VW had blatently lied and cheated.
The history of defeat devices is... complicated. Keep in mind the EPA chief is a political appointment. Their own interpretations of their own regulations can vary significantly from one administration to the next.
Setting aside the environmental impact of the false emissions claims -- deceiving millions of customers about a big ticket product should have a commensurate punishment.
Not enough, and I have a feeling that he should've been one of the dozens, if not hundreds.
Fraud in the case is commuted upon the buyers and everyone that breathes that air (cancers, asthma...etc). You're talking tens of billions. Go rob a store and you get a lot more jail time. Yeah the store owner and 3 customer were traumatized but so were the thousands or millions of people that suffered (directly or indirectly) from your fraud.
That will rather be interesting as with the enactment of the GDPR the most promising part is not punishment by arresting people but by cashing in 4% of global revenue for breaking privacy and consumer protection laws in EU.
And in the end, it's the money that hurts. Jails breaks can be made nice with cash in every country.
I'm not saying that the engineer shouldn't be responsible - he should - but it's an extreme double standard.