<p>Right now I'm in an engineering ethics class where I learned about the Challenger Space Shuttle and the management that played role to the disaster. Roger Boisjoly had the correct intentions to try and stop the launch from happening, but I don't think it's fair that he was blacklisted as an engineer. I understand that companies don't want whistle blowers but they rather risk a life? This is where things can get very hazy and can lead to legal battles. Anyways I wanted to know YOU'RE story as an experienced engineer?
This is also part of a paper where I can get insight of an experienced engineering. If anybody could be of an assistance to help answer these questions I would greatly appreciate it! Thanks.</p>
<p>-Have you ever been put in an awkward position between management and engineering?</p>
<p>-If you were in a position to be a "whistleblower", how would you protect yourself (reputation)?</p>
<p>-Are the employees ethical?</p>
<p>-Have you felt pressured by an employer to violate your sense of ethics?</p>
<p>-Have you experienced a moral dilemma that involved human lives? </p>
<p>-Have you put your career at risk?</p>
<p>-Which is more important to your company, making profits or safety + customer satisfied?</p>
<p>-What is the hardest ethical decision you have ever made related to your engineer career?</p>
<p>I haven’t experienced too much as a structural engineer. Mainly feeling rushed to design a building. Safety comes first, though!! Our mistakes could cost people their lives - have you read about the Kansas City Hyatt balcony collapse, where quite a few people were killed? That would give you some good insights. It happened while I was in grad school, and one professor spent some time talking about it with the students.</p>
<p>When I was a very young engineer, my employer asked me to backdate some calculations. I said no, and they didn’t pressure me.</p>
<p>The motto of my company is, “Make every job a winner.” We try to produce efficient designs that can be built with few questions. We’re more expensive than other firms, but we don’t get too many calls during construction. Smart clients appreciate that; the ones who are looking for a “cheap” engineer aren’t worth the bother.</p>
<p>I had to shut down the shipping of a product due to quality issues (it sold for thousands to hundreds of thousands so it was stopping or delaying revenue coming in the door). I presented my case to engineering and product management - product management would make the call. The product manager looked like he was going to have a heart attack. We shut down the product, worked very hard to fix the immediate problems and then management embarked on a serious quality program afterwards.</p>
<p>BTW, one of the guys that I worked with back then worked on the Therac 25 machine. The Therac 25 was a theraputic radiation machine that injured and killed a few people due to software bugs. We had to sit in a meeting room watching the 60 minutes video on the machine and the people that it harmed. The Therac 25 case study is often presented to CS Undergrad Majors and shows that software errors can have severe consequences.</p>
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<p>I haven’t been in a position to be a whistleblower. In a good organization, management sees a problem or a problem is brought to their attention and management fixes the problem.</p>
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<p>I believe that employees are ethical but reward systems, processes and procedures can make negative courses for products more attractive for the individual. In the banking crisis, those that made loans earned big commissions and they didn’t care that making bad loans could be ultimately bad for their companies.</p>
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<p>Once. That was when I learned that management wasn’t for me. I have been a manager in the past but dealing with people issues is a lot messier than dealing with things.</p>
<p>Awesome topic… looking forward to more responses.</p>
<p>Thanks for a great start people. I appreciate the response from everyone so far.</p>
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<p>I just remembered another incident. My husband designed the precast concrete facade of a building. He had to make sure each piece was reinforced and connected to the building frame properly. The building steel had been designed by a different engineer. DH noticed that quite a few of the beams seemed undersized, so he ran some quick calculations and became alarmed. He politely asked the building engineer about it, but the guy blew him off. DH eventually contacted the owner (a city in New York) to tell them his concerns. We never heard what happened.</p>
<p>^^wow that seems like a typical scenario that we have been going over in class. Glad to know your husband had the right (ethical) concerns.</p>
<p>By the way I can’t believe I wrote YOU’RE in the first post…i meant YOUR…smh</p>
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<p>I used to build satellites. We had a contract for two spacecraft that we were building for another country. My job was to make sure it earth-pointed as accurately as advertised when the contract was awarded (an ambitious performance level). Accurate pointing matters when the satellite is in a 22,000+ mile orbit. But the system relied on a relatively cheap “off the shelf” sensor that was new to our company. When we got actual test data from hardware supplier, I was concerned that it would not perform to the accuracy that had been cavalierly promised (by marketing people). I mentioned this to our program manager as a concern since my job as a Systems Engineer was to be the “technical conscience” of the company. Our program manager immediately dismissed my concerns, upbraid me for being overly conservative and warned me not to “worry” our customer “unnecessarily”. He clearly was not willing to address the issue. This was after a series of other issues with this manager, who constantly admonished us in SE to “do a C job”!
So I did two things after finding no support from my Systems Engineering manager. We had some junior level engineers from that country working with us, so I made sure they knew exactly what my hardware concerns were. Of course, a concern is just that- it’s not proof that something will fail nor is it proof that it will not fail. So the customer’s technical people knew what was going on. Then I found a job on another contract that had a program manager with a much higher level of integrity. Years later, after these satellites launched, I heard that two out of four spacecraft that this program manger oversaw experienced on orbit failures, which is a horrendous outcome. It was not our company’s finest hour and I was glad at that time, that we did not build hardware that human lives depended on.</p>
<p>BTW, I remember the day that Challenger exploded. Lots of sadness and disbelief. Lots of soul searching. </p>
<p>I’m glad to hear that classes are being taught based on that experience because there were some important lessons from that disaster. Thanks for posting, studentengineer.</p>
<p>Bump. Thanks</p>
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