Volkswagen's U.S. head: individuals engineered emissions cheating • Hacker News Board

Re: Volkswagen's U.S. head: individuals engineered emissions cheating

#61

Post by johansch » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 6:31 PM UTC

PaulAJ wrote: post #43

taylodl wrote: post #2

"This was a couple of software engineers who put this in for whatever reason," - I'm not buying it. What would be their motive compared say to VW's motive? VW has a heck of a lot more motive for falsifying emissions than do "a couple of software engineers." Even if you were to argue the engineers were somehow fearful for their jobs that's still VW's problem because they're the ones who created that work environment i…

No way could it be just a couple of software engineers. The engine is a system, and its the engine that has to pass the emissions tests. So that means the whole engine development team had to be in on it, including their technical management. They in turn would not have done such a thing if they had not believed that senior management wanted it, and it is the responsibility of senior management to make it clear what…

When this CEO of a company with 600k employees says "it's some software engineers", I assume he might actually be honestly referring to what we would call engineering managers, perhaps with hundreds of indirect reports, 2-3 levels down from the CEO.

I find this plausible...

(Particularly since these hearings seem designed to score political points rather than to find out what actually happened.)

Re: Volkswagen's U.S. head: individuals engineered emissions cheating

#62

Post by allengeorge » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 6:32 PM UTC

ohpea wrote: post #38

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they can. Most engineers (in the US) have to take an ethics course that covers this. Just because your boss says do something, doesn't give you a pass.

Do you have a source for ethics education and engineering? I've never heard of this being something that most engineers are taught (in the US).

Definitely had to take an ethics course when I went to Waterloo (in Ontario, Canada). I believe it's a requirement for a university's program to receive Engineering accreditation. At any rate, all engineers took it.

Re: Volkswagen's U.S. head: individuals engineered emissions cheating

#63

Post by mrighele » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 6:33 PM UTC

theli0nheart wrote: post #19

somebodyother wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, it implies a couple of engineers could slip through arbitrary code to be executed under selective conditions. That's terrifying.

And, supposing this is true, would you actually be surprised by this? This is a car company, not a CI and code-review obsessed software company in Silicon Valley.

I found products made by car companies to be in general more reliable than those made by software companies (either in Silicon Valley or not). I trust my life to my car (software included) every day. I wouldn't do that with any software of my smartphone, not even the OS.

Re: Volkswagen's U.S. head: individuals engineered emissions cheating

#64

Post by S_A_P » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 6:33 PM UTC

Expect VW US to play dumb until something out of Germany is officially done. VW wont go out of business, but they are 10 years from growth in the US and probably most other markets. I think the real fallout will come if the prestige brands are made to look bad. Audi and Porsche have much more to lose, and those are the profit centers for VW.

Re: Volkswagen's U.S. head: individuals engineered emissions cheating

#65

Post by xirdstl » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 6:38 PM UTC

Well, is there any surprise they've chosen a couple of fall guys to blame it on?

Re: Volkswagen's U.S. head: individuals engineered emissions cheating

#66

Post by maxerickson » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 6:39 PM UTC

kabdib wrote: post #59

"This was a couple of software engineers who put this in for whatever reason" This was a system. A complex one. No way it was done by a couple of guys at 2AM, or whatever. This has to have been inter-group collusion, and management is in CYA mode and shoving individuals under the bus. VW has gone from being a cravenly stupid company that is going to be fined billions of dollars, to a place where I suggest it is in ev…

Say the detection for the emissions testing is something like a flag in the software that says the car is on a dyno, or some other factors that the ECU has legitimate reasons to keep track of.

In that case, the defeat system is just a quick if else predicated on those state variables and swapping between a set of engine parameters that is emissions test safe and another set that provides better performance.

I don't mean to insist that this must be the case, I'm just trying to illustrate that the cheat could happen at a level where much of the complexity has already been abstracted away.

Re: Volkswagen's U.S. head: individuals engineered emissions cheating

#67

Post by Laaw » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 6:39 PM UTC

mrighele wrote: post #63

theli0nheart wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, supposing this is true, would you actually be surprised by this? This is a car company, not a CI and code-review obsessed software company in Silicon Valley.

I found products made by car companies to be in general more reliable than those made by software companies (either in Silicon Valley or not). I trust my life to my car (software included) every day. I wouldn't do that with any software of my smartphone, not even the OS.

Doesn't it blow your mind that there are no "standards of engineering" or whatever for software? There's no licensure body for software engineers who build software running your car, and therefore no accountability on a personal level.

When an engineer builds a bridge, she has to personally sign off on the bridge, saying it's safe, and is risking not only her professional career, but I think she can also be jailed and held criminally liable if the bridge kills people due to negligence.

It blows my mind, at least, that no such thing exists for software.

Re: Volkswagen's U.S. head: individuals engineered emissions cheating

#68

Post by jerf » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 6:40 PM UTC

eridius wrote: post #48

taylodl wrote: post #2

"This was a couple of software engineers who put this in for whatever reason," - I'm not buying it. What would be their motive compared say to VW's motive? VW has a heck of a lot more motive for falsifying emissions than do "a couple of software engineers." Even if you were to argue the engineers were somehow fearful for their jobs that's still VW's problem because they're the ones who created that work environment i…

Just because VW might have more motive to do this doesn't automatically mean that they're lying when they say it was the fault of individual engineers. Guilt is not determined by "who has the most motive", it's determined by who actually did it. Now it may very well be true that VW is lying and it was a corporate decision. But it's not completely implausible that this really was the decision of a few individual emplo…

"But it's not completely implausible that this really was the decision of a few individual employees."

Oh, I fully believe it was the decision of a few individual employees. I just don't believe those individuals were the actual coders. Coders will code to the spec they are given; problems are far more likely to lie in the spec layer.

It is possible it will turn out the coders should have known better. But it isn't even that hard for me to create plausible circumstances in which the coders didn't have any reason to believe they were doing anything wrong. Remember, we're only seeing the end-results, but it's not hard to imagine a combination of specifications where the programmers are assured each little step is legal and OK, and a combination of other optimizations combining together to produce this result, with no one person quite understanding the interactions.

And just to be clear, I work a lot in security, on the defense side. I'm familiar with taking the possibility that coders will be actively hostile seriously. But I'm also very familiar with seeing five intelligent people each acting according to their own best info and with their own best interests at heart interacting to produce blithering stupidity. It's not always as simple as it looks when you're just looking at the outcome.

Re: Volkswagen's U.S. head: individuals engineered emissions cheating

#69

Post by acd » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 6:40 PM UTC

In my country Audi says the cars using the engine are "technically safe to use and drive". I did report that to the consumer oversight board. I believe it's false marketing, the cars are a danger to pedestrians and cyclists outside the car.

I believe it's lies upon lies from the upper management seems like a corporate culture going wrong.

Re: Volkswagen's U.S. head: individuals engineered emissions cheating

#70

Post by randcraw » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 6:41 PM UTC

droithomme wrote: post #31

How is Volkswagen's US head, who lives and works in the US, able to issue proclamations with such certainty about the non-existence of private conversations and directions taking place among the engineering staff and management in Germany, where he spends almost no time? It is as if a US diplomat stationed in New Zealand used his authority to declare that Bush had never authorized any torture, and it was rogue indivi…

Exactly. If Mr Horn is certain of what he says, where's the proof? To make such allegations, any court would require that VW produce historical evidence of this misbehavior. Yet he offers none.

In the absence of such evidence, the responsibility for misdeed falls to the corporation's most senior executives -- for failing to create and maintain a process that should have captured and revealed such misdeeds, thereby PRODUCING THE MISSING AUDIT TRAIL.

Blame others without evidence ==> cover up.