When Goldman Sachs blamed their enormous options pricing fiasco on software engineers in 2013, it started the great brain drain of the last two years.
VW
11–20 of 46 posts
Re: VW
#12It's conjecture at this point to say anyone who programmed the ECU to do this knew what they were doing. Saying that, it is likely they did know but this comes from above. There's a few psychology experiments that show many humans will do things they know are wrong or immoral when an authority figure tells them to do it even though they don't want to do it. The Milgram Experiment, for instance, comes to this conclusi…
Is that the experiment that showed that "assholes" are the ones who wouldn't do what they were told if they found it immoral?
While the "nice" and "obedient" always did as they were told? Then we're told never to hire "assholes".
Re: VW
#13Sometimes I would not mind if developing software would need a license, even if I'm speaking against myself ATM.
No kidding. If a team of Doctors, Lawyers or Professional Engineers (Civil, Mechanical, etc.) had been involved in a ethics disaster of similar scale, those people would be in danger of loosing the ability to continue practicing at a professional level.
Re: VW
#14It's conjecture at this point to say anyone who programmed the ECU to do this knew what they were doing. Saying that, it is likely they did know but this comes from above. There's a few psychology experiments that show many humans will do things they know are wrong or immoral when an authority figure tells them to do it even though they don't want to do it. The Milgram Experiment, for instance, comes to this conclusi…
Is that the experiment that showed that "assholes" are the ones who wouldn't do what they were told if they found it immoral? While the "nice" and "obedient" always did as they were told? Then we're told never to hire "assholes".
I am not a psychologist, nor did I even take 101 in college, but I don't know if the Milgram Experiment came to a conclusion about perceived personality types. I did have a passing interest in these types of experiments for a few hours and read overviews and conclusions to them and I believe I recall "agreeableness" being something humans strive for to get accepted into a group. The Asch experiment in the 1950's showed people will purposely give the wrong answer if others in the group gave the wrong answer to a basic perception question. [1]
"Assholes", in your context would be people that don't fit the "culture" of the companies "group". Possibly off topic, but it's one of the reasons I always get a bit nervous when companies define their "culture".
Re: VW
#15Sometimes I would not mind if developing software would need a license, even if I'm speaking against myself ATM.
No kidding. If a team of Doctors, Lawyers or Professional Engineers (Civil, Mechanical, etc.) had been involved in a ethics disaster of similar scale, those people would be in danger of loosing the ability to continue practicing at a professional level.
There is almost certainly a PE that is responsible for the emissions systems in these cars.
That doesn't mean they are going to be the only person at the company that is responsible, but they signed off on it and are responsible for it in the context you speak of.
Re: VW
#16It is absolutely plausible that the programmers had no idea. From the excellent Metafilter thread: > i mean, how do the product managers rationalize this feature to their colleagues? what to they write in the spec that isn't all-out incriminating? Modularity Department 1: Req 1: Software should enable emissions controls upon receipt of control signal A. Req 2: Software should disable emissions controls upon receipt o…
Still seems kind of fishy, at least without some stated reason why it needs to know it's being tested.
Re: VW
#17I find his assertion that the programmers "should have known" to be beyond naive.
There's a reason that teams designing these sorts of systems consult with lawyers who are experts on the relevant law. The programmer's job is to program. Expecting them to also deal with details of legality and morality (beyond grossly obvious things like hard coding dosage limits into medical equipment) is just wishful thinking.
That's the kind of talk that people want to hear. "Oh the developers were given shitty instructions, they shouldn't have listened" but talk is cheap. Stop to consider the implications of that sort of second guessing. Obviously things get wacky at both extremes but when you give someone a spec to meet you need to have an expectation that it will meet that spec. Our industry is built upon millions of black boxes that meet I/O spec sure having the developers turn around and say "we changed you spec because it was killing polar bears" comes with a much larger can of worms than just implementing what you're told to implement and accepting that it might not be morally agreeable and getting on to the next thing.
There's a reason people aren't all generic worker bees. It's efficient to have the lawyers worry about laws, coders worry about code and managers act as the interface between them and accept the blame if what the lawyers say isn't properly translated into the programmers' instructions. than it is to have all three groups worry about all three subjects.
I think law is interesting and has a lot in common with software developing but I don't want to have to go looking up case law as required research before coding a windshield wiper controller..
Re: VW
#18I suppose you could make the argument that these programmers did not know what they were doing. That they were simply given some specs, and they implemented those specs, and didn't know that they were accomplices in a case of massive fraud. I think that argument is even more asinine than Michael Horn's. They knew. And if they didn't know, they should have known. They had a responsibility to know. I agree with all the…
"There are all kinds of reasons why a car has to behave differently while on a dynamometer and there are all kinds of special code branches that are executed only during test. For the programmers it probably was just another special case among many."
I think the point is that someone deliberately did this and they had their hands in the code. Yes, there are variants of the tune-able parameters for various regions and tests. As part of design and validation these can be used interchangeable on the test beds. However, someone, somewhere wrote the emissions defeator.
Re: VW
#19When Goldman Sachs blamed their enormous options pricing fiasco on software engineers in 2013, it started the great brain drain of the last two years. https://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2015/34-75331.pdf
Great brain drain? Meaning software engineers are leaving banks in large numbers?
Re: VW
#20What is stopping a company from hiring a contractor to code the illegal parts to thereby insulate them from responsibility? This happens with oil and gas disasters as discussed on John Oliver https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYusNNldesc