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In an observation piece at Scientific American, Ralph Nader (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader) writes about the decades of struggles by conscientious engineers—whether employees or consultants—who strive to balance professional ethics with occupational survival.
Nader writes:
[...] today's engineers are working in an improved environment for taking their conscience to work. Yet much more remains to be done to safeguard the ability of engineers to speak truth to the powers-that-be.
For starters, the word whistle-blower—once popularly meant to describe a snitch or a disgruntled employee—now describes an ethical person willing to put his or her job on the line in order to expose corrupt, illegal, fraudulent and harmful activities. Indeed, in the aftermath of recent Boeing 737 MAX crashes, the media routinely and positively refers to disclosures by "Boeing whistle-blowers." Congressional investigating committees and federal agencies have called for whistle-blowers to come forward and shed light on corporate misdeeds and governmental agency lapses.
To put it mildly, this was not always the case.
LINK: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/when-engineers-become-whistleblowers/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 16 2019, @01:47AM
Replying as Anonymous so i don't tip off my colleagues to the strategy.
Whenever i am starting the interview process, i always buy one share of voting stock in the company i am interviewing with.
Whenever i am starting a contract with a company, i specify that a single share of voting stock vests on day 1 of the contract.
This is my right to sue.
If the employee's of a company that i own, are following practises that can damage the value of my investment, then i will go out of my way to have them fired, as they are costing me money.
If every engineer did this, along with getting everything in writing, then companies would be forced to be more ethical, using the existing levers of the law.
when it's economically worth the extra effort, i will go as far as to get some pre-prepared injunctions, that can be set up in advance, in order to stop the specific forms of poor practises that i have observed.
The short-term sociopaths that are unhappy with this, will be removed from the company, as i explicitly bar them from operating within the company i partly own while the lawsuit is taking place, and bar them from using company resources to defend themselves in a lawsuit, so it costs them personally.
If they don't like it, then they should stop practising unethical and illegal behaviours.
As Naseem Taleb says,If you don't have Skin-In-The-Game, then you won't really be motivated to get things right."
By putting them in a situation where behaving unethically costs them personally, you can get them to behave ethically as it is more personally profitable.