Engineers: "This is possible but we will need to equip every car with an expensive sensor suite"
Management: "So you're saying we can just remove the sensors and figure it out with your engineering magic, you guys are really good at that, you got my iPhone connected to ICloud so you must be reeeally good with technology."
Engineers: "..."
Management: "Also, anyone not up to this task is fired."
This is true, but when safety is on the line it actually goes further than that. As an engineer you have an ethical duty to say no to making a product unsafe for end users or the general public.
It doesn’t matter if you get fired, if your boss goes to the media to bitch about you, if your boss threatens to sue you, you as an engineer hold a position of public trust to keep the people that use your product safe. If you don’t respect that and take it seriously, well we see where oceangate ended up.
Yeah my boss has been going back and forth with me on this for months. Wanting to release unsecured products to the general public. I’m getting exhausted with him. I hold the keys and frequently I’ve told him no, and threatened to quit. Each time they just retreat back and hold a meeting how it will “stay on dev for now”. The features aren’t even feasible to release in the near future but I know they will force the issue. My resignation letter is on the table.
The number of times I've rejected something because of security flaws (usually database injection), only to see other engineers later approve and merge the pull request is infuriating. There seems to always be an engineer who is willing to make an unsafe product.
Yep, it's a damn shame, but we're gonna let them do that because we don't want to be responsible for deaths or security flaws and ultimately there's organizations and people out there who value that if our current jobs don't
And neither have FAANG companies for the massive social consequences to ubiquitous surveillance
This moral high ground you think you’re standing on doesn’t exist, and won’t until engineers who push back get the support from society to do so. They currently are very much expected to stand up to a corporation on their own, risking their own livelihood, and that’s plain bullshit