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

reuters.com

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

#51

Post by _pmf_ »

Tomte wrote: post #8
neya wrote: post #3

While the article does mention one more guy (Oliver Schmidt), it's a shame they just put the whole thing on this Engineer, when in reality there is no way this could have been pulled off by two people without the rest of management's knowledge/approval. Are you seriously telling me that only this single guy was responsible for all the emissions that were found in the TDI range of diesels, all the way from A3 to A8? S…

This is a common sentiment here on HN, and it is entirely devoid of factual grounding. This is one guy who happened to travel to the USA (stupid move: asking US authorities before travelling "hey, are you going to arrest me?" and taking their word that no, they don't plan to…). Another American VW guy has already been sentenced. The "real culprits" are all living in Germany. And the investigation in Germany is ongoin…

> But this takes time

If processes against German bank managers serve as example, it will take exactly long enough to satisfy the statute of limitation.

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

#52

Post by Tomte »

kome wrote: post #49
Tomte wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common sentiment here on HN, and it is entirely devoid of factual grounding. This is one guy who happened to travel to the USA (stupid move: asking US authorities before travelling "hey, are you going to arrest me?" and taking their word that no, they don't plan to…). Another American VW guy has already been sentenced. The "real culprits" are all living in Germany. And the investigation in Germany is ongoin…

VW and the German government are basically "cooperating" on everything [1] [2] [3]. It's extremely naive to think that VW will get a fair trail in Germany. [1] https://qz.com/1045619/germanys-diesel-scandal-shines-a-ligh... [2] http://www.climatechangenews.com/2017/09/05/lobbying-data-re... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/02/world/europe/germany-volk...

The German government doesn't control the prosecution. Especially not because it's not a federal investigation. Criminal matters are state matters, with very few exceptions.

And to counter your next try: No, the government of Lower Saxony does not control the prosecution either.

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

#53

Post by watwut »

w_t_payne wrote: post #46
csydas wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a major difference in butterfly effect scenarios and intentionally misleading and commiting fraud. It's why mens rea is part of the equation for judgement. Intent means a lot; if it weren't, we wouldn't differentiate between manslaughter and murder. The VW engineers intentionally designed a system meant to defraud tests and avoid regulations, misleading consumers and regulators about the product. Thi…

It doesn't have to be an order on high. The engineering management team is pretty good at making sure that such orders are almost never given explicitly. If they absolutely must to be given explicitly, then they are never ever given in writing. Most of the time, though, they don't need to be. All you need to do is to create a culture where even the smallest failure is not acceptable, where employees are regularly abu…

What you describe is true and makes it harder to prosecute the management. That does not excuse individual engineers for effectively their own decisions.

Leaving such company or not having much career is ethically much higher then participating at fraud. And engineers do such decisions and earn less money because they did such decisions.

Another contributing factor is larger culture that treats such people as losers or "makers of excuses" for lesser success and excuses or celebrates those who merely did not get caught.

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

#54

Post by wffurr »

baddox wrote: post #11
skrebbel wrote: 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.

When asked why you were fired, being able to say "I was asked to do something illegal or unethical" is a strong response. That certainly helps with the "find a new job" part.

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

#55

Post by ImSkeptical »

baddox wrote: post #11
skrebbel wrote: 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.

Don't say "No" then, but agree and report to the authorities.

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

#56

Post by gech »

wffurr wrote: post #54
baddox wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When asked why you were fired, being able to say "I was asked to do something illegal or unethical" is a strong response. That certainly helps with the "find a new job" part.

I could easily see the interviewer twist this to ask the next question "But does that mean you won't be loyal to us??"

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

#57

Post by ju-st »

JohnGB wrote: post #41

Okay, so it's okay to go after an engineer at VW for gaming the system, and causing higher emissions than everyone thought, but not okay to go after bankers for fraud which screwed the world economy? I'm not saying that the engineer shouldn't be responsible - he should - but it's an extreme double standard.

Banks are too big to fail in the US. German car companies are not too big to fail in the US.

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

#58

Post by Banthum »

avar wrote: post #35
shubhamjain wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Nobody's attributing deaths to single causes. When we say e.g. that coal plants kill N number of people per year it's not the case that someone breathed in some coal particulates and keeled over night there at the age of 20. Rather, we know from epidemiological data that certain pollution, foods etc. shorten your life by a given amount. Let's say life expectancy is 100 years, living near a coal plant subtracts 5 year…

That's one way to calculate it.

Other times, people measure life in "quality-adjusted years". So a coal plant that kills a young person every 20 years is worse than one that kills 78-year-olds regularly. This is a more rigorous method, measuring quality*years instead of deaths, which is why you almost never see it in activist claims. It's too rigorous to be manipulated.

Other times, people just look at the immediate cause of death (e.g. lung cancer) and extrapolate to the cause of that cause (e.g. air pollution). But this imports a lot of assumptions and is easy to game. For example, I've seen cases where hundreds of thousands of deaths have been attributed to a given cause, but it turns out that those people were dying just a few years short of average life expectancy, and would've died for other reasons very soon regardless - quite different from the image of people in their prime dying needlessly.

It's good to question these figures. As they are currently presented, we don't know the methodology, which makes them meaningless.

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

#59

Post by roman_savchuk »

wslh wrote: post #42
Hamuko wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy lead the emission compliance unit in the US. He was most likely in charge of taking the software designed in Germany and adapting it so that it works with the emission tests performed in the US. As far as I can remember, the software was pretty closely monitoring the driving style and comparing it to the test suite that was performed in the EU in order to activate the cheats. They probably had to perform the…

And QA engineers or security reviewers never detected this in the source code? I would love to see how many people participated in those source code repositories.

Except, they don't work with actual source code. An engineering team responsible for adaptation for certain market, most likely works in calibration space, that's it, just data (flags, thresholds and tables, thousands of them). To access this data they rely on ASAP2 description databases which are simply very large text files [1] containing ROM addresses, parameter names, etc. I don't know the whole VW workflow, but can imagine how one could define a set of switching parameters for cheating, and then delete their definitions, leaving these parameters invisible.

[1] https://vector.com/vi_datadescription_ecu1_en.html

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

#60

Post by GolDDranks »

gech wrote: post #56
wffurr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When asked why you were fired, being able to say "I was asked to do something illegal or unethical" is a strong response. That certainly helps with the "find a new job" part.

I could easily see the interviewer twist this to ask the next question "But does that mean you won't be loyal to us??"

On the other hand, you could always respond by saying: I expect not to be asked to do something illegal; I have no interest in working for such a company. However, I have high expectations of you, and that's why I believe I can be fully loyal to you.
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