
When Engineers Become Whistleblowers - furcyd
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/when-engineers-become-whistleblowers/
======
VengefulCynic
Within the financial services industry, there are significant monetary
incentives for whistleblowers to come forward with evidence of malfeasance.
The SEC offers something like 0.5% of recovered funds, which can amount to
millions of dollars... which is important because even with the protections
afforded by Dodd-Frank, it's a very real possibility that you won't work in
the finance industry again.

By contrast, while it might not be a permanent career-ending event for an
engineer to blow the whistle at an engineering company, it holds the
significant risk of ending the engineer's career at that company. Not to
mention lawsuits and the cost of finding a new job. Most every engineer I know
wants to do the right thing... but those are powerful headwinds. So on the
mere suspicion of misfeasance or malfeasance, the prospect of losing a job and
being embroiled in a lawsuit serves as a powerful deterrent.

People will point out (correctly) that adding financial incentives will
inevitably lead to a combination of malicious compliance and misreporting, so
there's a line that has to be drawn. Also, protections in private sector are
either toothless or come with expensive oversight, but it's clear that if the
government wants more whistleblowing from the ranks of normal engineers (and
that's a big 'if'), they probably need to do something more to cause it to
happen besides just keep asking.

~~~
throwaway55554
> ... which is important because even with the protections afforded by Dodd-
> Frank, it's a very real possibility that you won't work in the finance
> industry again.

If nobody will hire a whistleblower, that leads me to believe everyone has
skeletons to hide.

~~~
bediger4000
> that leads me to believe everyone has skeletons to hide.

I for one, am willing to go with this. But I will add that managers (in lots
of industries) take exceptional delight in messing with their employees. I'm
not sure why, other than a lust for arbitrary power, but it's there. Some
aerospace companies are legendary for making engineers work over holidays,
and/or on Saturdays, for example. I worked in a smaller company where the
owner felt he had a right to dictate how his employees should vote. In 1995.

Control issues may be more prevalent than skeletons.

~~~
skookumchuck
> I worked in a smaller company where the owner felt he had a right to dictate
> how his employees should vote.

Since we have a secret ballot (which is a good thing) in the US, how on earth
could anyone "dictate" who you vote for?

~~~
specialist
Postal balloting, aka vote by mail in our state.

Plenty of cases of "ballot parties" in unions, military, churches, job sites,
etc.

~~~
skookumchuck
You're under no obligation to show your vote to anyone. Voting by mail only
keeps records that you voted - not who you voted for - and that information is
certainly not shared with your boss.

All voting booths I've seen had a curtain for privacy.

~~~
specialist
I don't follow.

A ballot records votes. Otherwise it's not a ballot.

Are you saying we live in a world without coercion? That various organizations
haven't hosted ballot parties?

------
theuttick
I worked on the space program for a few years.

Massive fraud that was carried out with an audacity that would make Boss Hogg
blush. When I initially complained, my boss told me that NASA was "a middle
class welfare program" and that I shouldn't take it so seriously.

Eventually, I reached a point where I just couldn't sign off on purchasing
equipment for testing an item that simply didn't exist. I was working 60 hours
a week for low pay doing the work that had been reported to have been done
years beforehand and just couldn't do it any more.

After taking two systems from months/years behind schedule to months ahead, I
was fired. No discussion, no debate, no warnings, no notifications.

They lied to the Texas Workforce commission and said that I was warned and got
caught. TWC refused to do anything about it.

NASA inspector general found that everything that I said was true, but that me
being fired was not something they would handle.

There is no wrongful termination in Texas.

A decade later, the project(s) I was working on at the time was finally moved
from the contractor to government funded equipment - meaning the government
was going to have to do what the contractors were originally paid to do.

No one cares.

------
elliekelly
Engineering whistleblowers are so interesting to me because systemic fraud
often requires management to "segregate" the duties across teams to conceal
the true nature of what's going on which makes it difficult for any one person
to pick up on. But the typical engineer, unlike the typical medical billing
specialist or accountant, for example, has a tendency to keep asking "why"
when things don't make sense. It makes me wonder whether there's something
engineering whistleblowers might be able to teach their less technical peers
in other industries.

~~~
fwip
I'm not sure you know many accountants if you think they don't like drilling
deep.

~~~
elliekelly
I am one. I've managed teams of them. And I've worked at a big 4 accounting
firm.

Accountants look for evidence that supports management's claims. They do not
ask "why."

~~~
mturmon
There is of course a huge difference between an "accountant" and a CPA. CPAs
do have a code of ethics, but I'm not sure if it really has any teeth in
practice. Care to comment?

~~~
elliekelly
> There is of course a huge difference between an "accountant" and a CPA.

This is a very good point. And I should probably clarify that when I wrote my
original comment I was indeed thinking more of a "bookkeeper" than a CPA.

I am (fortunately) not too familiar with the AICPA's enforcement of their Code
of Conduct. As far as the obligations of a CPA who suspects fraud it's more of
a duty to report suspicions to someone in management who's probably not
involved in the fraud and is in a position to investigate it. But it's very
situation-dependent.

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tareqak
I know my suggestion would be an inappropriate use of protected class, but why
don't whistleblowers get that level of protection? If a society wants to put
ethics at the forefront of its leadership, then ethical people need to be able
to continue working in their careers to progress further as opposed to being
pushed out for doing what society wants them to do. If a society doesn't want
whistleblowers, then it shouldn't reward them and it should even consider
penalizing them. The prevailing sentiment about whistleblowers and
whistleblowing seems ambiguous and akin to a sort of NIH: people are alright
with having whistleblower in places anywhere except for their own
organization.

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MaupitiBlue
Is anyone else surprised that there have been no whistleblower leaks wrt the
737 Max and MCAS?

Are we left to conclude that there really weren’t any engineers who thought
putting in a system like MCAS, giving it authority to override the pilots,
making it dependent on a single AOA sensor, not testing the system under a
sensor failure, and not telling pilots or carriers about said system was a
really bad idea. Yet we’re 6+ months out, and we’ve heard nothing other than
the AOA disagree light issue.

~~~
rectang
With two planes down and hundreds of people dead, all the ugly stuff is coming
out now, regardless. It's not necessary for a whistleblower to step out and
sacrifice their life to bring us that information.

And I'm skeptical whether there was ever enough certainty with regards to the
deadliness of MCAS which could have justified a whistleblower level of
personal sacrifice. It's easy for me to believe that people thought it would
be good enough, or that at least that no one felt sure that it would fail.

We should treat whistleblowers better, but our safety and regulatory regimes
should be designed to function without them.

~~~
bumby
I think you hit a good point. I'm fairly confident that most engineers/people
will make the call if it's a clear-cut case of "this will inevitably lead to
catastrophe"

But in the real-world, everything is shrouded in a level of uncertainty. For
most bad scenarios, people are really good at rationalizing why it's not going
to happen. Unfortunately, it seems the level of rationalization is directly
proportional to their incentives against admitting that bad outcome is a real
possibility.

------
fareesh
James O'Keefe had a few former Twitter engineers caught on camera talking
about "unwritten rules" and shadowbans for certain points of view. Sadly given
his record, he could film an actual alien invasion and people wouldn't believe
it until the planet was destroyed.

Probably doesn't meet the standard for whistleblowing though, since it's just
censorship by a private company.

~~~
quacked
Ever since the his piece on ACORN, I have no respect for that guy.

~~~
viggity
i'm not saying the guy has never done some shady shit (hello, wire tapping a
senator?). But what was wrong with the ACORN videos. That seemed pretty cut
and dry.

~~~
fareesh
I think the story is that the people recorded in the video called the police
right after O'Keefe left.

------
bluetomcat
An engineer likes to model the world in terms of systems with interconnected
moving parts, but rarely accounts for the irrational human political factor.
What may be fraudulent or inefficient to an engineer may be a "necessary evil"
to a policy maker, in order to satisfy the group interest of a company or
nation.

Making things 100% efficient and transparent seems like a dystopia with a
central world government and no pluralism whatsoever.

~~~
nathanvanfleet
Wait so corruption and cover ups is your utopia in this scenario? Companies
committing crimes that are never uncovered so they can hold onto power and
make just a little more money?

~~~
bluetomcat
It is essentially tribalism in a very refined form. Each group wants a larger
portion of the pie and in order to get it, often finds unethical but legal
ways of doing so.

Only by raising the general awareness level of the whole population, we can
refine tribalism even more by refining the legal and social frameworks.

~~~
AstralStorm
As it is, those frameworks are controlled by political tribalism, enabled by
the fact that general voters think tribal.

Chicken and egg problem in its shell.

------
rmbryan
... by Ralph Nader

“the [engineering] profession must assert itself towards its most magnificent
aspirations—for so much of our future is in your trust.”

------
appleflaxen
A related concept (and tool for whistleblowers) is the qui tam lawsuit:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qui_tam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qui_tam)

------
salawat
The aviation industry is actually pretty notorious for tight lippedness given
that it's a sector that has higher than normal cross-section with National
Security concerns.

A lot of information that has come out has likely been lead to by the fact
there are people who can tell others where to look, and what questions to ask
who aren't bound by any sort of an NDA, or any concerns of getting blackballed
by the industry.

That's my guess anyway. A little bit of knowledge, speaking the lingo, and an
independent perspective goes a long way toward piercing through the veil of
institutional secrecy. The truly arcane is very infrequently the root cause of
a severe problem in my experience. Almost every high severity problem results
from the seed of problems endemic to the culture that has been architected in
a workplace.

If you have a culture that discourages costly non-value adds (and is daft
enough to consider Quality/Safety Assurance a non-value add), you're going to
have blind spots that will come back to haunt you. Engineers may not find it a
naturally comfortable course of action to speak up and hold people
accountable, right down to requiring a manager to deliver to you a signed
piece of paper swearing that X or Y will not happen because reasons, and it is
the decision of <insert manager's name here> that this path of inquiry is not
productive enough to follow, for you to then pin your rebuttal to and send up
formal chains of authorization; creating that dastardly paper trail that makes
everyone squirm.

I don't even pull that one out unless it is something particularly egregious,
and at that it would usually only be after getting the ball rolling to bring
about a culture change to undo the myopia that has clearly set in already to
allow things to degenerate to that point.

Nobody wants to be the bad guy, or think they are working for the bad guy,
which makes it d difficult at times to assume the mantle of That Guy, but
that's where your people who really do Quality thrive. It doesn't make you
super popular or get you invited to fancy parties, but if you stick to it,
you'll become one of the most positive forces for change wherever you are.

Until you run into the Liar up the chain of command of course. Then the
politics commence, and victory/positive outcomes are not guaranteed.

And Quality people seldom have golden parachutes.

~~~
bumby
I think it's important to institute a formal method to document these
decisions. Too often there's a diffusion of responsibility/accountability. If
there are specific processes being deviated from, they get documented along
with the associated risks/mitigation and the approach gets accepted by the
appropriate authority. If there's risk-documenting process in place, nobody
has to feel like a bad guy for forcing someone to put their name on the dotted
line. In my experience, this tends to force people to really think about the
risks they are taking and, at the very least, make a more informed decision.
Of course, this requires requirements to be there in the first place to
deviate from; it requires a managed process.

For example, if Boeing categorized MCAS software as 'critical' they may have a
process that says any critical software requires redundant inputs. If a
business decision was made to avoid redundant inputs on base models, a manager
should be signing off on this documenting the associated deviation/risks and
why they are acceptable. Woe be the manager who signs off saying they will
accept a risk of a plane crash to up-sell a redundant sensor.

------
ocschwar
A big problem is that it takes whistle blowers in the first place.

This is why we have PE certification: so that projects with safety
implications can't go forward if engineers are silent, instead of letting
silence imply consent.

~~~
throwayEngineer
You think the PE test stops corruption?

Lol no.

If anything it limits the pool of people that can speak up.

I passed the PE, but that has nothing to do with ethics and responsibility. In
the end, it's up to the human.

Edit, passed the FE, but that's the hard one.

~~~
ocschwar
Not the test. When you're a PE and you stamp a design, you're affirming the
following:

1\. I am qualified and able to judge the fitness for purpose and safety of
this design. 2\. In my estimation it is safe and fit for purpose. 3\. I can
explain my decision to any of my peers. 4\. I am holding myself legally liable
for that decision.

I passed the FE too. And I found the civil engineering questions to be pretty
easy. But I was only filling up a scantron sheet, not taking charge of human
lives.

~~~
bigger_cheese
>I am holding myself legally liable for that decision

Yes that's one of the key things I was taught during my engineering degree
here is Australia. If you certify something as fit for purpose while acting in
the role of a professional engineer you can be held legally liable if you were
found to be negligent in performing your duties.

In short we were taught if you are going to sign off on something as being
safe and fit for purpose you had better make damn sure of it.

Ethics in general was a big part of my degree (I was at uni in the mid 2000's)
there were mandatory course on social responsibility and ethics every year
from second year through to fourth year. These included topics on subjects
like liability, whistle-blowing and disclosure.

In general I think the large focus engineers have on ethics is a big reason
the public has a lot of trust in engineers and engineers regularly rank highly
in list of most trusted professions (For example here:
[https://www.businessinsider.com.au/ranked-
australias-20-most...](https://www.businessinsider.com.au/ranked-
australias-20-most-trusted-professions-2015-5))

------
temp1029
I wonder if anyone would actually choose to work somewhere if they thought
that one possible outcome was to be a whistleblower to that company and make
out with $X?

------
quotemstr
It's important to clarify that "whistleblowing" should apply only to conduct
that's outright illegal or that's morally repugnant to almost everyone. Over
and over again of late, I've seen plain old politically-motivated leaking
motivated as "whistleblowing". No, activist, you don't get to advance a
political agenda by hijacking the word "whistleblowing" and applying it to
your attempt to pressure the company via the press into enacting your
preferred policy.

