I guess I see it differently. Management definitely failed to react properly once it became obvious the switch was faulty. I mean, apparently it came up in car reviews of all places.
However, if you're the lead engineer on the switch, you have 23 years of experience on the job, it's your responsibility not to say "fuck it, just ship it." It's his signature on the paperwork. This wasn't a one-time one-day bad decision. This is a switch he worked on for three years.
The right course of action is refuse to sign off on a faulty part, and then not try to conceal that the part was faulty once people start dying. Every project has schedule pressure, so if schedule pressure is somehow a defense then engineers are never responsible. I simply don't buy that. Management can decide they want to override the engineer and ship it anyway. GM can fire the guy for not agreeing to ship a faulty part, but then DeGiorgio could have been a whistle blower collecting 1/3rd of the damages against GM right now.
I don't blame it singularly on the engineer. TFA says that GM’s Director of Product Investigations shut off the car with her knee, so this goes way beyond just the engineer. But I don't think that lets the engineer off the hook either. The engineer failed spectacularly, possibly criminally, and I hope he has to face a jury of his peers for this. Management also failed the same way, and if the investigators were in place to really push this, I'm sure the paper trail is there to at least indite some of these greedy complacent fools.
"However, if you're the lead engineer on the switch, you have 23 years of experience on the job, it's your responsibility not to say "fuck it, just ship it." It's his signature on the paperwork. This wasn't a one-time one-day bad decision. This is a switch he worked on for three years."
I think you're still not getting the point. The way modern management works, and this seems to be nearly universal now, is that it leaves the professional still formally in charge and still liable but creates a situation where there is massive pressure to follow the schedule.
GM can fire the guy for not agreeing to ship a faulty part, but then DeGiorgio could have been a whistle blower collecting 1/3rd of the damages against GM right now.
Oh, you can't collect damages for fatal decision you prevented and then were fired for. Even more, the point bad engineering decisions is not that they are not guaranteed fatal but simply that they might be. If you dig your heals to prevent them, you get fired - the bad decision gets made but turns out not to be fatal but sequence of events is still fatal your career. Even if you warn about each one, you'll get fired 'cause management will see and won't want you covering your ass at every turn. They want you, silently making the decisions on the impossible schedule they set, to be the device they use to cover their asses instead. That is the point of the whole structure.
Of course there's pressure to follow the schedule. There's also pressure not to kill people with sloppy work. Did you miss the part about fudging the part number, the lying, the cover-up?
I don't understand your second point. Keep in mind that he could have signed off on the faulty part initially, and only after the first reports of a safety issue started trickling in he could have raised holy hell with management and if they did nothing then he could have become a whistleblower. 20% of the problem was initially failing to design a proper switch, but 80% of the problem was how DeGiorgio and GM overall behaved afterwards.
The point is there is a strong regulatory framework which lets you fully and properly fuck your managers and live out a very happy life if they actually try to force you to cover up a mistake like this, but only if you have the ethics to do the right thing. Instead DeGiorgio allegedly spearheaded the cover-up personally.
I've worked at a hardware startup verifying specifications and watched the level of process around BOM changes (it's off the charts compared to software change tracking). I'm really surprised it was even physically possible for DeGiorgio to make the hardware change without changing the part number.
There was one time in my career an engineer fabricated test results because the schedule didn't allow enough time to properly run them. I discovered the falsified results and discovered it, and the engineer was ultimately fired. The next guy in the position worked within the system to properly communicate how long the tests took to run, and the result was that some less critical testing was skipped, and the rest got the appropriate resources to complete them. But you do not get to just lie and say everything was done just because the schedule was unrealistic. Schedules are always unrealistic.
However, if you're the lead engineer on the switch, you have 23 years of experience on the job, it's your responsibility not to say "fuck it, just ship it." It's his signature on the paperwork. This wasn't a one-time one-day bad decision. This is a switch he worked on for three years.
The right course of action is refuse to sign off on a faulty part, and then not try to conceal that the part was faulty once people start dying. Every project has schedule pressure, so if schedule pressure is somehow a defense then engineers are never responsible. I simply don't buy that. Management can decide they want to override the engineer and ship it anyway. GM can fire the guy for not agreeing to ship a faulty part, but then DeGiorgio could have been a whistle blower collecting 1/3rd of the damages against GM right now.
I don't blame it singularly on the engineer. TFA says that GM’s Director of Product Investigations shut off the car with her knee, so this goes way beyond just the engineer. But I don't think that lets the engineer off the hook either. The engineer failed spectacularly, possibly criminally, and I hope he has to face a jury of his peers for this. Management also failed the same way, and if the investigators were in place to really push this, I'm sure the paper trail is there to at least indite some of these greedy complacent fools.