This is really interesting and I think a fundamental difference between engineering and law (my profession).
In the legal sphere the incentive is basically to act like everything is perfect at all times. Technically according to the law you can be sued if you had a wheelchair ramp work 364 days a year but be closed on one.
You can be sued for clearing 99pct of the ice from your driveway if someone slips on the 1pct. If you'd cleaned 99 pct of the driveway as a lawyer you would announce: we cleaned the driveway!
The engineer might opine about how she failed to get the last 1pct and why. The lawyer would tell her to be quiet because she risks being sued.
To my mind the engineering model is better. I don't like the legal model. But it is what exists, and I guess this is why we tell engineers to delete their Slack logs every couple of years.
Maybe if you don't leave a paper trail. If you use a written medium to communicate failure, there is a good chance that will be exposed during discovery in a lawsuit, and now the plaintiffs can show that not only was there a problem, but that employees were aware of the problem and did not fix it.
The news article practically writes itself. "Despite repeated claims that all ice had been cleared, internal documents show multiple employees were aware that only 99% had been cleared. These emails show considerable concern about the remaining 1% of ice, but no further action was ever taken by the company to rectify the dangerous situation."
In the legal sphere the incentive is basically to act like everything is perfect at all times. Technically according to the law you can be sued if you had a wheelchair ramp work 364 days a year but be closed on one.
You can be sued for clearing 99pct of the ice from your driveway if someone slips on the 1pct. If you'd cleaned 99 pct of the driveway as a lawyer you would announce: we cleaned the driveway!
The engineer might opine about how she failed to get the last 1pct and why. The lawyer would tell her to be quiet because she risks being sued.
To my mind the engineering model is better. I don't like the legal model. But it is what exists, and I guess this is why we tell engineers to delete their Slack logs every couple of years.