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VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

reuters.com

11–20 of 134 posts

Re: VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

#11
post #7

Fantastic precedent. When your boss tells you to do something unethical and possibly illegal, you now have a great reason to say no.

Is it a good enough reason though? That would depend on the likelihood of losing your job by refusing, the ease of finding a different job, the seriousness of the unethical request, and the likelihood of getting caught.

Re: VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

#13
post #11
post #7

Fantastic precedent. When your boss tells you to do something unethical and possibly illegal, you now have a great reason to say no.

Is it a good enough reason though? That would depend on the likelihood of losing your job by refusing, the ease of finding a different job, the seriousness of the unethical request, and the likelihood of getting caught.

What's good enough is always going to be an individual decision, but it's better to be able to reference a concrete expectation of jail time.

Re: VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

#15
post #11
post #7

Fantastic precedent. When your boss tells you to do something unethical and possibly illegal, you now have a great reason to say no.

Is it a good enough reason though? That would depend on the likelihood of losing your job by refusing, the ease of finding a different job, the seriousness of the unethical request, and the likelihood of getting caught.

Extracting the maximum value from their employees is a core competence of most automotive companies. With no union to protect them, naive low ranking software engineers are exceedingly vulnerable to aggression and abuse from their line manager, It is hardly surprising that the resulting culture is one which rewards dishonesty and fraud above all else.

Re: VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

#16
post #14

Good. For context, air pollution kills 200,000 in the US and 40,000 in UK every year. You have to consider ethics in your work as an Engineer. Refusing an unethical task is your moral duty.

Yes ... but as engineers we need to support the professional organisations that in turn will support us when we need to make these difficult and politically courageous decisions.

Re: VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

#17
post #14

Good. For context, air pollution kills 200,000 in the US and 40,000 in UK every year. You have to consider ethics in your work as an Engineer. Refusing an unethical task is your moral duty.

40,000 people are dying from air pollution in the U.K.? Citation really needed.

Re: VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

#18
post #14

Good. For context, air pollution kills 200,000 in the US and 40,000 in UK every year. You have to consider ethics in your work as an Engineer. Refusing an unethical task is your moral duty.

Is it even possible to attribute a death to single, specific cause like pollution? What is the median age of these deaths? How did they happen? Do certain occupations make people more vulnerable to pollution exposure?

Re: VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

#19
post #14

Good. For context, air pollution kills 200,000 in the US and 40,000 in UK every year. You have to consider ethics in your work as an Engineer. Refusing an unethical task is your moral duty.

>You have to consider ethics in your work as an Engineer. Refusing an unethical task is your moral duty.

It's easy to say, but ethics isn´t always so black and white. What about yourself. Do you drive a car? Then you are guilty of contributing to the air pollution that kills 200,000 in the US ever year, and you also endanger others' life by participating in traffic and making it more dangerous. You are also contributing to sponsoring the salaries of the car industry overall, which means you are indirectly sponsoring the development of more lethal machines, which also by the way enables murderers to transport themselves more rapidly to their victims.

Did you post a helpful comment on HN or stackoverflow, and this comment helped a programmer in North Korea to develop their nuclear weapons just a little bit further, is that ethical?

You have to consider ethics, but an "unethical task" depends so much on context.

Re: VW engineer sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

#20
Not enough, and I have a feeling that he should've been one of the dozens, if not hundreds.

Fraud in the case is commuted upon the buyers and everyone that breathes that air (cancers, asthma...etc). You're talking tens of billions. Go rob a store and you get a lot more jail time. Yeah the store owner and 3 customer were traumatized but so were the thousands or millions of people that suffered (directly or indirectly) from your fraud.

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