When Engineers Become Whistleblowers

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/when-engineers-become-whistleblowers/

by furcyd • 7 years ago

273 127 7 years ago

blogs.scientificamerican.com

rmbryan• 7 years ago

... by Ralph Nader

“the [engineering] profession must assert itself towards its most magnificent aspirations—for so much of our future is in your trust.”

MaupitiBlue• 7 years ago

Is anyone else surprised that there have been no whistleblower leaks wrt the 737 Max and MCAS?

Are we left to conclude that there really weren’t any engineers who thought putting in a system like MCAS, giving it authority to override the pilots, making it dependent on a single AOA sensor, not testing the system under a sensor failure, and not telling pilots or carriers about said system was a really bad idea. Yet we’re 6+ months out, and we’ve heard nothing other than the AOA disagree light issue.

djhaskin987• 7 years ago

The article refers to Boeing and the whistleblowers from that company involved in disclosing problems with the 738 MAX, so apparently there were leaks.

e40• 7 years ago

It's unclear. There was a podcast I listened to recently that featured several Boeing whistleblowers, but they focused on the 787 not the 737. Just because we haven't heard about them doesn't mean they don't exist. Whistleblowers don't necessarily contact the media, they might just be contacting the FAA.

And, the FAA, in the case of the previously mentioned 787 whistleblowers, did not take any real action against Boeing.

I can try and dig up the podcast if anyone is interested.

rectang• 7 years ago

With two planes down and hundreds of people dead, all the ugly stuff is coming out now, regardless. It's not necessary for a whistleblower to step out and sacrifice their life to bring us that information.

And I'm skeptical whether there was ever enough certainty with regards to the deadliness of MCAS which could have justified a whistleblower level of personal sacrifice. It's easy for me to believe that people thought it would be good enough, or that at least that no one felt sure that it would fail.

We should treat whistleblowers better, but our safety and regulatory regimes should be designed to function without them.

bumby6• 7 years ago

I think you hit a good point. I'm fairly confident that most engineers/people will make the call if it's a clear-cut case of "this will inevitably lead to catastrophe"

But in the real-world, everything is shrouded in a level of uncertainty. For most bad scenarios, people are really good at rationalizing why it's not going to happen. Unfortunately, it seems the level of rationalization is directly proportional to their incentives against admitting that bad outcome is a real possibility.

specialist4• 7 years ago

"...our safety and regulatory regimes should be designed to function without them"

As I understand it, subverting the oversight regimes, allowing Boeing to sign off on their own work, is a big part of this story.

I was a SQA Manager for a while. Every writer needs an editor. It blows my mind that we still believe people can catch their own mistakes.

Source: My neighbor and bestie was a Boeing lifer, mostly working in QC/QA. I get to hear all about this stuff.

boomlinde• 7 years ago

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boeing-737-max-8-at-least-4-pot...

Roark66• 7 years ago

I am surprised, but at the same time I'm aware that unfortunately there is an endemic lack of taking responsibility in many modern engineering professions. Software engineering being one of them. I often see by myself and read about other cases elsewhere of examples of badly designed and written software being put in place due to short shortsightedly perceived financial goals of doing so.

I bet that every software engineer encountered such software in their career. Were the engineers that created it incompetent? Perhaps, but more likely is that they were put under pressure to deliver such flawed solutions, and people who said no were replaced with those that said yes no matter what.

I recently watched a documentary about death penalty and how states couldn't get doctors to design the lethal injection because none would agree to work on it. I envy that doctors can have such integrity, but as a group we engineers have very little when money is involved.

ryandrake• 7 years ago

Perhaps, but more likely is that they were put under pressure to deliver such flawed solutions, and people who said no were replaced with those that said yes no matter what.

Early in my career I asked to not work on a project on ethical grounds, and my manager said “fine, Ted is fine with doing it, so I’ll assign you to a different project!” Years later I actually quit a job partially over objection to some less than ethical uses of the technology, and the boss never even broke a sweat. There were lines of developers out the door willing to replace me.

Software engineering talent is effectively unlimited because we have no professional organization that caps supply, like doctors have. This leads to all kinds of races-to-the-bottom.

bsder• 7 years ago

I am surprised, but at the same time I'm aware that unfortunately there is an endemic lack of taking responsibility in many modern engineering professions. Software engineering being one of them.

There is no such thing as "Software Engineer". You can't get a Professional Engineering license for it, nor can you be sued for not adhering to standards.

The National Society for Professional Engineers (NSPE) was screaming for years that software people should not be allowed to call themselves engineers. They lost that battle, and here we are with your comment. And the all the resulting issues that the NSPE predicted.

I recently watched a documentary about death penalty and how states couldn't get doctors to design the lethal injection because none would agree to work on it. I envy that doctors can have such integrity, but as a group we engineers have very little when money is involved.

This has nothing to do with integrity and everything to do with the fact that you could lose your medical license.

You would have to offer a doctor enough money to cover the rest of their career, and states are notoriously cheap.

Kiro• 7 years ago

From the article you're replying to:

"Indeed, in the aftermath of recent Boeing 737 MAX crashes, the media routinely and positively refers to disclosures by “Boeing whistleblowers.”"

afterburner• 7 years ago

The article states:

Indeed, in the aftermath of recent Boeing 737 MAX crashes, the media routinely and positively refers to disclosures by “Boeing whistleblowers.”

So, I guess there are some whistleblowers?

manfredo• 7 years ago

Was there any actual malicious or reckless intent behind these events? From what I gathered, there were a whole chain of bad decisions:

* Moving the engines higher and forward and keeping the same aircraft designation.

* Patching this design change over with software to push forward on the yoke at high AOA.

* Failing to account for AOA sensor failure.

* A bad trim-resetting logic that let MCAS exert almost total authority over the elevators.

* Poor pilot training on these new features

All these things came together to make planes fall out of the sky, I'm not sure if there was any one individual that had the whole picture in their mind.

VengefulCynic2• 7 years ago

Within the financial services industry, there are significant monetary incentives for whistleblowers to come forward with evidence of malfeasance. The SEC offers something like 0.5% of recovered funds, which can amount to millions of dollars... which is important because even with the protections afforded by Dodd-Frank, it's a very real possibility that you won't work in the finance industry again.

By contrast, while it might not be a permanent career-ending event for an engineer to blow the whistle at an engineering company, it holds the significant risk of ending the engineer's career at that company. Not to mention lawsuits and the cost of finding a new job. Most every engineer I know wants to do the right thing... but those are powerful headwinds. So on the mere suspicion of misfeasance or malfeasance, the prospect of losing a job and being embroiled in a lawsuit serves as a powerful deterrent.

People will point out (correctly) that adding financial incentives will inevitably lead to a combination of malicious compliance and misreporting, so there's a line that has to be drawn. Also, protections in private sector are either toothless or come with expensive oversight, but it's clear that if the government wants more whistleblowing from the ranks of normal engineers (and that's a big 'if'), they probably need to do something more to cause it to happen besides just keep asking.

snarf21• 7 years ago

Agree completely. Companies will do whatever it takes to drive sales and revenue and stock price. Employees don't want to raise their hand and get fired as they have families to support. A true whistleblower program with WITSEC level provisions for protection and monetary support would help cut this down. Once it happens once or twice companies are very disincentivized to continue down this road.

emilecantin3• 7 years ago

This is the point of having Professional Engineers and a very strict deontological code; it tips the incentive scale towards doing the right thing.

When asked to do something unethical, the P.E. has a choice: they can refuse, in which case they might lose their job; or they can comply, in which case they might lose their license altogether (and thus their job).

Verdex5• 7 years ago

While I like the idea of something that helps software engineers to make the right decision due to simply self preservation (so we'll reach even the most self centered software engineer), I don't think Professional Engineering licenses are going to be able to help.

If you're designing a bridge, this is pretty obvious work and it's pretty isolated. What I mean by that is that A) you're not going to go off and design bridges in secret and then sell those designs to someone who will build it in secret such that the public will later make use of the bridge. At some point someone in the government is going to ask why there's a new bridge over that river. And B) there isn't a huge world wide market for bridges that has near infinite sub niches in nearly every market imaginable.

So having a professional engineer license for bridges makes sense because if the license is lost, then it really does mean the end of your career.

Software is often an engineering artifact, but it's also like mathematics. And it's also like literature. You might be able to stop someone from selling their services directly, but you can't stop them from writing code altogether without forming a terrifying oppressive distopia.

So the Professional Software Engineer might not care about losing the license because they can still sell their skills to companies on the other side of the world where there is no regulation. Or they can create their own product that contains software and sell that product. Or they can publish their software on github and somehow make enough from tips that they don't need another job. Or they can get a job that doesn't require software development but can be highly augmented by it. Or they can make websites technologically unsophisticated users.

Losing the license doesn't mean that their career is over. It is only a slight annoyance. There's always going to be enough software engineers that aren't afraid of losing a license that the ones that are afraid won't prevent anything problematic from happening.

vonmoltke2• 7 years ago

That, in turn, requires licensure to be a condition of employment, which is tricky because a) an engineer needs to be employed for a minimum period of time before they can get licensed in the first place and b) the industrial exemption means that most engineers don't actually need a license, and indeed most don't have one (at least in the US).

bumby6• 7 years ago

Does software have the equivalent consensus standards like other engineering disciplines? Or more importantly, are they as readily adopted? It seems like there's a cultural problem with software development that would be an impediment to having a licensed approach.

I know there's lots of IEEE standards that cover good practices, but they don't seem to be as adhered to as, say, ASME codes in the oil/gas industry.

Maybe there's a slow change already happening. I know controls engineer licenses have become more common and NCEES now offers a software curriculum.

lazyasciiart• 7 years ago

There were plenty of professional (not software) engineers at Boeing and Volkswagen and I haven't heard about any of them losing their licenses.

hrktb2• 7 years ago

There was recently the John Oliver show about death penalty, where physicists couldn’t cooperate in death penalty settings as it was against their pledge.

The result was not that nothing was done, but instead medical substances are used by non medical staff, doing unethical operations.

I think the same basically happens in the software industry: some of us have a pledge, but it just means little to nothing as anyone can replace us on the iffy parts, and we still build libraries that benefit any use.

It also reminds me of the “don’t use for evil” bit in the json license, where IBM kindly requested a special license to do whatever it wants with it.

harimau777• 7 years ago

Doesn't that boil down though to: "You may as well do the right thing because you are going to be punished either way."

Compared to the alternative of protecting the engineer, that seems like a rather dystopian way to encourage doing the right thing.

neilv2• 7 years ago

I'm inclined to believe that most people want to do the right thing, but, right now, in some fields, I'm not seeing much evidence.

In "tech", most of the noise we're hearing within the field about responsibility seems to be coming from two directions: (1) some of the most abusive/dangerous companies, looking to manage PR and give the appearance of self-regulation; and (2) people seeing this as an opportunity for their own careers as intellectual, "thought leader", or PR cover, seemingly more interested in career than mission.

What we're not hearing is many "tech" employees avoiding and fleeing the companies that are well-known to be irresponsible, sometimes arguably criminally so. Each of our mental lists of the least-responsible "tech" companies might differ, but some I'd suspect would be on most people's lists are flocked to by new grads every year. Did their colleges and general awareness of industry not clue them in, do they have no other employment options, or is responsibility not a factor in career and "total comp"?

Even those of us who don't go to what we think are the worst companies, perhaps the majority of us knowingly employ practices that a modest amount of forward thinking should suggest is irresponsible (e.g., grabbing users' data without informed consent, leaking every Web site visitor's detailed behavior to various third parties in the business of profiling, etc.). Before these practices became normalized, "tech" people could've (and often did) tell you that this sort of thing was a bad idea, and actively fought against some of them. Organizations like the EFF, CPSR, and EPIC (and efforts like PGN's Risks) started for a reason, and there was demand for that among the much smaller "tech" world. Now things we'd already foreseen as bad are normalized, and if you point it out, there's usually silence, derision, or what might as well be quoting of Ayn Rand.

VengefulCynic2• 7 years ago

Mike Monteiro has a series of very opinionated (and highly-entertaining) presentations on this phenomenon, coming from the perspective of a designer. If what neilv is saying resonates with you, you owe it to yourself to check out the Designer Code of Ethics: https://deardesignstudent.com/a-designers-code-of-ethics-f4a...

specialist4• 7 years ago

Maybe we need more investigatory journalism to counterbalance.

Back when I was an election integrity activist, muckraking and so forth, I'd occasionally get hot tips from insiders. Off the record, of course.

Alas, saving democracy doesn't pay very well. I couldn't figure out how to pay the bills, continue the work, and not burn out.

I'm also interested in the ombudsman role(s), and what potential for oversight and governance they have.

mrep• 7 years ago

It actually ranges from 10 percent to 30 percent of the money collected when the monetary sanctions exceed $1 million [0]. In the linked case, 2 whistle blowers shared a 50 million dollar reward. Now that is an incentive.

[0] https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-44

PaulHoule• 7 years ago

It's not just an incentive, it's necessary.

Being a whistleblower is astonishingly destructive to your career in many ways. Even if there wasn't the issue of getting blackballed, the psychological trauma of it is immense.

The only way you can create the psychological safety that makes it possible is to make sure the whistleblower gets paid enough that they aren't going to need to to work again. If they've got that security, they might be able to work again.

throwaway555542• 7 years ago

... which is important because even with the protections afforded by Dodd-Frank, it's a very real possibility that you won't work in the finance industry again.

If nobody will hire a whistleblower, that leads me to believe everyone has skeletons to hide.

ambicapter2• 7 years ago

Even if you're not responsible for something that would need to be reported, how certain can you be that none of your bosses or underlings are? Pretty safe to assume the worst.

jedimastert• 7 years ago

If nobody will hire a whistleblower, that leads me to believe everyone has skeletons to hide.

That statement has a "if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide" kind of vibe to me.

eeZah7Ux6• 7 years ago

Spot on. It's very telling that companies (that often claim to follow ethic guidelines and so on) don't rush to hire a whistleblower.

On the contrary, whistleblowers go unemployed.

woofie11• 7 years ago

That assumes:

1. The whistleblower are always right and the company is always wrong. I've seen it go both ways. On an engineering project, a junior engineer misinterprets something, and then starts sending upset, angry emails with odd allegation. If there is any litigation about anything later, if those emails come up in discovery, you've got a multimillion dollar problem.

2. The company won't retaliate otherwise. In whistleblowing instances I've seen, the company engages in a smear campaign on the engineer. Having a billion dollar corporation hire a PI to investigate you, and then spread rumours about you to the media can kill a career. Is Julian Assange a sexual predator? Or was he set up? No one knows.

bediger40002• 7 years ago

that leads me to believe everyone has skeletons to hide.

I for one, am willing to go with this. But I will add that managers (in lots of industries) take exceptional delight in messing with their employees. I'm not sure why, other than a lust for arbitrary power, but it's there. Some aerospace companies are legendary for making engineers work over holidays, and/or on Saturdays, for example. I worked in a smaller company where the owner felt he had a right to dictate how his employees should vote. In 1995.

Control issues may be more prevalent than skeletons.

gnopgnip• 7 years ago

It affects other industries too. In the military there is a similar stigma around reporting sexual assault or rape.

skookumchuck7• 7 years ago

If nobody will hire a whistleblower, that leads me to believe everyone has skeletons to hide.

Would you have second thoughts about marrying someone who went through an ugly divorce? Sure, the person says the ex-spouse was the bad one. Do you accept that unquestioningly?

wolfgke• 7 years ago

If nobody will hire a whistleblower, that leads me to believe everyone has skeletons to hide.

In German language, there actually exists no native word for "whistleblower" (one uses the English word). The German word is "Denunziant" (denunciator - I don't know whether the English word has the same negative connotation as the German one).

With the experience with the state security service (Stasi) of the GDR, people really well-understand why they don't want a denunciator in their company even if the respective person does not plan to denounce, since if there exists a potential denunciator at the workplace, everybody has to live in potential fear.

skookumchuck7• 7 years ago

There's also the issue of a disgruntled engineer wanting to lash back at the company, and so exaggerating/misrepresenting issues. Whistleblowing isn't always employee=good / company=bad. Sometimes it's the other way.

bluetomcat2• 7 years ago

An engineer likes to model the world in terms of systems with interconnected moving parts, but rarely accounts for the irrational human political factor. What may be fraudulent or inefficient to an engineer may be a "necessary evil" to a policy maker, in order to satisfy the group interest of a company or nation.

Making things 100% efficient and transparent seems like a dystopia with a central world government and no pluralism whatsoever.

nathanvanfleet• 7 years ago

Wait so corruption and cover ups is your utopia in this scenario? Companies committing crimes that are never uncovered so they can hold onto power and make just a little more money?

bluetomcat2• 7 years ago

It is essentially tribalism in a very refined form. Each group wants a larger portion of the pie and in order to get it, often finds unethical but legal ways of doing so.

Only by raising the general awareness level of the whole population, we can refine tribalism even more by refining the legal and social frameworks.

closetohome• 7 years ago

And a 100% transparent and efficient government would create a dystopia. Apparently.

nitwit005• 7 years ago

The system requires people who aren't Engineers to take action. Engineers aren't writing or enforcing the law.

The world view of engineers isn't particularly important, except to cause them to report something.

ocschwar2• 7 years ago

A big problem is that it takes whistle blowers in the first place.

This is why we have PE certification: so that projects with safety implications can't go forward if engineers are silent, instead of letting silence imply consent.

throwayEngineer• 7 years ago

You think the PE test stops corruption?

Lol no.

If anything it limits the pool of people that can speak up.

I passed the PE, but that has nothing to do with ethics and responsibility. In the end, it's up to the human.

Edit, passed the FE, but that's the hard one.

jldugger• 7 years ago

No, but PE's have to sign off on designs. They have to speak in _favor_ of a project and design, and that's presumed to be a mildly higher bar for the marginal ethical dilemma.

vonmoltke2• 7 years ago

Edit, passed the FE, but that's the hard one.

Unless something has changed since I got my Bachelor's, the FE is the easy one (at least if you take it near graduation).

the_jeremy• 7 years ago

Also took the FE, very much disagree that it's the hard one.

coupdejarnac2• 7 years ago

In my state, each year we're required to take a 1 hour ethics class.

Sure, that doesn't stop you from doing something unethical. If you get caught, you're either going to have to pay a large fine or change careers. Or go to jail.

Edit: Also, around half the people who take the PE exam fail it. I took the computer engineering exam and breezed through it. If someone failed the same exam I took, I would have serious doubts about their ability to do engineering.

ocschwar2• 7 years ago

Not the test. When you're a PE and you stamp a design, you're affirming the following:

1. I am qualified and able to judge the fitness for purpose and safety of this design. 2. In my estimation it is safe and fit for purpose. 3. I can explain my decision to any of my peers. 4. I am holding myself legally liable for that decision.

I passed the FE too. And I found the civil engineering questions to be pretty easy. But I was only filling up a scantron sheet, not taking charge of human lives.

iancmceachern• 7 years ago

There are tons of projects, especially in the bay area, with extreme safety implications which do not necessarily as a standard practice employ PEs for the work. Try finding a SW PE to work on your surgical device, doesn't exist.

quotemstr• 7 years ago

It's important to clarify that "whistleblowing" should apply only to conduct that's outright illegal or that's morally repugnant to almost everyone. Over and over again of late, I've seen plain old politically-motivated leaking motivated as "whistleblowing". No, activist, you don't get to advance a political agenda by hijacking the word "whistleblowing" and applying it to your attempt to pressure the company via the press into enacting your preferred policy.

elliekelly4• 7 years ago

Engineering whistleblowers are so interesting to me because systemic fraud often requires management to "segregate" the duties across teams to conceal the true nature of what's going on which makes it difficult for any one person to pick up on. But the typical engineer, unlike the typical medical billing specialist or accountant, for example, has a tendency to keep asking "why" when things don't make sense. It makes me wonder whether there's something engineering whistleblowers might be able to teach their less technical peers in other industries.

fwip3• 7 years ago

I'm not sure you know many accountants if you think they don't like drilling deep.

elliekelly4• 7 years ago

I am one. I've managed teams of them. And I've worked at a big 4 accounting firm.

Accountants look for evidence that supports management's claims. They do not ask "why."

mywittyname• 7 years ago

At the risk of ousting myself as an idiot: I never ask why.

I honestly have little to no idea how the software I work on works, outside of my narrow scope of responsibility. I just do what the work as defined in the story, then go home.

salawat• 7 years ago

The aviation industry is actually pretty notorious for tight lippedness given that it's a sector that has higher than normal cross-section with National Security concerns.

A lot of information that has come out has likely been lead to by the fact there are people who can tell others where to look, and what questions to ask who aren't bound by any sort of an NDA, or any concerns of getting blackballed by the industry.

That's my guess anyway. A little bit of knowledge, speaking the lingo, and an independent perspective goes a long way toward piercing through the veil of institutional secrecy. The truly arcane is very infrequently the root cause of a severe problem in my experience. Almost every high severity problem results from the seed of problems endemic to the culture that has been architected in a workplace.

If you have a culture that discourages costly non-value adds (and is daft enough to consider Quality/Safety Assurance a non-value add), you're going to have blind spots that will come back to haunt you. Engineers may not find it a naturally comfortable course of action to speak up and hold people accountable, right down to requiring a manager to deliver to you a signed piece of paper swearing that X or Y will not happen because reasons, and it is the decision of <insert manager's name here> that this path of inquiry is not productive enough to follow, for you to then pin your rebuttal to and send up formal chains of authorization; creating that dastardly paper trail that makes everyone squirm.

I don't even pull that one out unless it is something particularly egregious, and at that it would usually only be after getting the ball rolling to bring about a culture change to undo the myopia that has clearly set in already to allow things to degenerate to that point.

Nobody wants to be the bad guy, or think they are working for the bad guy, which makes it d difficult at times to assume the mantle of That Guy, but that's where your people who really do Quality thrive. It doesn't make you super popular or get you invited to fancy parties, but if you stick to it, you'll become one of the most positive forces for change wherever you are.

Until you run into the Liar up the chain of command of course. Then the politics commence, and victory/positive outcomes are not guaranteed.

And Quality people seldom have golden parachutes.

bumby6• 7 years ago

I think it's important to institute a formal method to document these decisions. Too often there's a diffusion of responsibility/accountability. If there are specific processes being deviated from, they get documented along with the associated risks/mitigation and the approach gets accepted by the appropriate authority. If there's risk-documenting process in place, nobody has to feel like a bad guy for forcing someone to put their name on the dotted line. In my experience, this tends to force people to really think about the risks they are taking and, at the very least, make a more informed decision. Of course, this requires requirements to be there in the first place to deviate from; it requires a managed process.

For example, if Boeing categorized MCAS software as 'critical' they may have a process that says any critical software requires redundant inputs. If a business decision was made to avoid redundant inputs on base models, a manager should be signing off on this documenting the associated deviation/risks and why they are acceptable. Woe be the manager who signs off saying they will accept a risk of a plane crash to up-sell a redundant sensor.

appleflaxen• 7 years ago

A related concept (and tool for whistleblowers) is the qui tam lawsuit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qui_tam

temp1029• 7 years ago

I wonder if anyone would actually choose to work somewhere if they thought that one possible outcome was to be a whistleblower to that company and make out with $X?

fareesh2• 7 years ago

James O'Keefe had a few former Twitter engineers caught on camera talking about "unwritten rules" and shadowbans for certain points of view. Sadly given his record, he could film an actual alien invasion and people wouldn't believe it until the planet was destroyed.

Probably doesn't meet the standard for whistleblowing though, since it's just censorship by a private company.

quacked2• 7 years ago

Ever since the his piece on ACORN, I have no respect for that guy.

viggity• 7 years ago

i'm not saying the guy has never done some shady shit (hello, wire tapping a senator?). But what was wrong with the ACORN videos. That seemed pretty cut and dry.

tareqak• 7 years ago

I know my suggestion would be an inappropriate use of protected class, but why don't whistleblowers get that level of protection? If a society wants to put ethics at the forefront of its leadership, then ethical people need to be able to continue working in their careers to progress further as opposed to being pushed out for doing what society wants them to do. If a society doesn't want whistleblowers, then it shouldn't reward them and it should even consider penalizing them. The prevailing sentiment about whistleblowers and whistleblowing seems ambiguous and akin to a sort of NIH: people are alright with having whistleblower in places anywhere except for their own organization.

theuttick• 7 years ago

I worked on the space program for a few years.

Massive fraud that was carried out with an audacity that would make Boss Hogg blush. When I initially complained, my boss told me that NASA was "a middle class welfare program" and that I shouldn't take it so seriously.

Eventually, I reached a point where I just couldn't sign off on purchasing equipment for testing an item that simply didn't exist. I was working 60 hours a week for low pay doing the work that had been reported to have been done years beforehand and just couldn't do it any more.

After taking two systems from months/years behind schedule to months ahead, I was fired. No discussion, no debate, no warnings, no notifications.

They lied to the Texas Workforce commission and said that I was warned and got caught. TWC refused to do anything about it.

NASA inspector general found that everything that I said was true, but that me being fired was not something they would handle.

There is no wrongful termination in Texas.

A decade later, the project(s) I was working on at the time was finally moved from the contractor to government funded equipment - meaning the government was going to have to do what the contractors were originally paid to do.

No one cares.

When Engineers Become Whistleblowers

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