Fake CV lands top 'engineer' in jail for 15 years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8er2990ydpo

by cwwc • 2 years ago

93 84 2 years ago

Not a software engineer, fyi.

buran77• 2 years ago

"Engineer" in the software world is just a job title like calling yourself a "scrum ninja". It's not a protected title like "professional engineer" in the US or the equivalent in SA. The bar for the former is "I like it", the bar for the latter is usually set by law.

Lying about your software engineering chops might get you fired, maybe even on the hook in a civil lawsuit. Lying about being a professional engineer while practicing engineering is usually a criminal matter.

So I can't imagine lying about your software engineering chops landing you in prison even if we're talking about critical sectors like medical or aerospace.

fsckboy3• 2 years ago

"Engineer" in the software world is just a job title like calling yourself a "scrum ninja". It's not a protected title like "professional engineer" in the US

getting an engineering degree from a university requires you to study a lot of the same higher mathematics regardless of specific field, and entitles you to call yourself an engineer, even in CS.

the "professional engineer" certification is a bit more vocational, indicates you've passed qualifying exams based less on intense math and more on your knowing standards for specific govt building codes, etc.

bschmidt1• 2 years ago

Despite being called an "engineer" a lot in recent years, it always feels icky because of what you just said here about it being a protected title in other industries. Not quite imposter syndrome - just feels like the wrong word for our job. It at least leaves out the linguistic/creative aspect of programming, and the execution/quality aspect of putting it all together.

It's more like digital construction: Programming is more like the construction project, and less like the AutoCAD "design" piece that engineers work on. The AutoCAD piece has more in common with product design than programming.

If anything, designers should be "engineers" and "eng. directors", and programmers should be "technicians" and "technical directors". They engineer products, with deliverables being design documents. And the techs implement it with the deliverable being the technology itself.

BoingBoomTschak• 2 years ago

I completely agree, but we need some kind of title to differentiate the people who are as versed in CS and pragmatic programming - from the lowest asm/C to Lisps and MLs - and the typical JavaScript dev who did a web course.

At least here, both are called (software) developers and I really don't want to be painted with the same brush as web cowboys who don't value stability and things done "properly".

m3kw9• 2 years ago

Fraud lands…

Terr_• 2 years ago

True, I myself could whip up a a dozen fake CVs/resumes right now with no jail risk whatsoever, the real crime is fraud and the CV was just an implementation detail.

bhouston• 2 years ago

This is more than just a fake resume.

He claimed to be an engineer, which is a profession with real formal qualifications, because there are real consequences (e.g. buildings falling down, bridges collapsing, people dying.)

alephnerd2• 2 years ago

He also forged qualifications and references.

The case is also linked to the larger system of patronage and state capture that existed under Zuma, where if you paid the right people who back then were in the ANC, plenty of doors would open up.

Cyril Ramaphosa began a cleanup of the ANC, but it's still a work in progress AND Zuma and his patronage network have created their own party that is undercutting the ANC's vote share (at least the private sector forced the ANC-DA-IFP coalition).

It's a stunning reversal for a country that 15 years ago was on track to become a developed country.

South Africa in the late 2000s to 2011 was at the same distance from becoming a World Bank High Income country that Serbia and China are at today in the late 2010s and early 2020s, and South African companies like Naspers (Reddit, Tencent, VK, StackOverflow, Udemy, OLX), MTN Group (major telco player in MENA), ShopRite (major retailer across Africa which is basically a Walmart or Lidl-lite), and Vodacom (major telco and formerly satellite player in MENA and Asia) were on track to becoming major players globally.

inglor_cz• 2 years ago

"Zuma and his patronage network have created their own party that is undercutting the ANC's vote share."

At least they are in the opposition now and not in government. If they stayed within ANC, they would have much more influence.

loceng• 2 years ago

What if he outsourced his work to actual engineers?..

alephnerd2• 2 years ago

It was a patronage role (think like the no work jobs in The Sopranos).

A portion of his salary most likely ended up in the party fund.

petre3• 2 years ago

Outsource what, influence peddling? Good riddance.

marcel_hecko• 2 years ago

In that case he is not acting as a chief engineer,rather as a procurement or purchaser. Chief engineer is not a role where you can simply pass on engineering responsibility to third party.

gerdesj• 2 years ago

"He claimed to be an engineer"

There are many here that do the same: Many IT jobs have titles with engineer (and architect, int al) in them. Those "engineers" are not chartered in the formal sense. The term engineer is somewhat watered down these days, in a formal sense - it has become commonplace.

I studied as far as what can be described as a civil engineering technician. Not an engineer. I own an IT company with 30+ years time served at the ... keyboard and rack and rails. I've frozen my nuts off in ill advisedly cold computer rooms to rescue improbably important systems and so on.

Anyway, I allow some of my staff to call themselves technicians or techies, never engineers. I encourage the term "consultant" for time served staff.

miki123211• 2 years ago

The term engineer is somewhat watered down these days

That's a US thing, there are countries (notably Canada) where advertising yourself as an engineer without actually earning the title is illegal.

drbig• 2 years ago

Railway engineering... 15 years career, which tells quite a lot about a lot of things, generally nothing good. Best aspect is it doesn't seem anyone got physically hurt in "the process of career progression". Quite scary.

PaywallBuster2• 2 years ago

earning an annual salary of about 2.8m rand ($156,000; £119,000).
he had forged a job offer letter from a German company, which encouraged Prasa to increase his salary
He was also at the forefront of a 600m rand deal to buy dozens of new trains from Spain, but they could not be used in South Africa

masfuerte• 2 years ago

Spanish trains don't fit in Spanish tunnels either!

https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/02/21/unspeakable-botch...

(The manufacturer actually warned that they were the wrong trains and the Spanish state rail company ignored them.)

randerson• 2 years ago

600m rand is about $34 million. If "dozens" means at least 24 trains, that seems... surprisingly cheap per train, especially for government spending?

PaywallBuster2• 2 years ago

The thirteen Afro 4000 diesel locomotives that have so far been delivered to Prasa are worth R600 million and form part of a larger R3.5 billion order for 70 new locomotives.

https://groundup.org.za/article/spain-investigates-the-too-t...

https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/92966/new-report-...

I think most commonly they'll use dozens for any number larger than 12, not specifically a multiple of it

observationist• 2 years ago

Looks like he ordered trains that were too tall, risking issues with tunnels, turn engineering, derailment, etc, and got caught by people who actually did know the engineering and science involved. Some things require credentials because it's evidence that the person knows what questions to ask, what to look for, and how to plan within the constraints of their domain of expertise.

This guy could probably do a great job supporting a person or team that had the right training, but his ignorance was risky, regardless of his intentions.

I've seen the flip side, too, where PhDs have given awful people license to behave badly, inflicting their "expertise" on people as if it made up for the lack of diligence and follow-through, leaving destroyed companies and people in their wake.

Gotta have the work ethic and the training - the institutions behind formal engineering disciplines do a great job of ensuring they qualify the people who will put in the work and know what they're doing.

api• 2 years ago

Credentials are one of those things that amplify social effect. A good person with credentials can do more good more easily. An idiot, dishonest person, or delusional ideologue with credentials can do a lot of harm.

A good example of the latter effect is that thoroughly debunked autism/vaccine paper from a while back that has probably cost thousands of lives at a minimum.

sublinear• 2 years ago

I bet this guy still made better decisions than any AI as well.

arp242• 2 years ago

Asking "will these trains actually work on our infrastructure?" is a pretty obvious question to ask, not requiring any great in-depth engineering education or insight. This is also the sort of question a chief engineer can just delegate to an underling to research. It's of course easy for me to say that in hindsight, but you really do need to be beyond clueless to never even consider it. I just did high school, don't know much about trains, and I'm reasonably sure I would checked. I might have been found out in some other way, but not through this.

Seems more of a good old-fashioned corruption case. And oh yes, by the way, he also faked his PhD.

charlie0• 2 years ago

Should have gone into politics.

SoftTalker• 2 years ago

Do employers actually check references and claimed qualifications anymore? Or do you just have to do well at solving interview puzzles?

massysett• 2 years ago

Yes, my employer routinely calls references before hiring, and as a supervisor I have answered many reference calls regarding former employees.

jamesfinlayson• 2 years ago

Apparently, though I often wonder what the HR department actually asks given some of the people that I've worked with.

bdcravens• 2 years ago

Hence why throwing around the term "engineer" in software is silly. There's little consequence to misrepresenting yourself in software, other than your immediate employment and maybe a financial lawsuit. In other professions, enforcement has real teeth due to the stakes of failure.

itronitron• 2 years ago

But so many bugs in software can be fixed by just turning the computer off and back on again. Is that great engineering or bad?

zo1• 2 years ago

To be honest, "engineers" in the physical sciences generally have a much easier and predictable time than programmers. Is that perhaps a fault of programmers, very possibly (nevermind, definitely our own doing). The reason I say they have an easier time is that a lot of their "problems" are solved, have general solutions and lookups, best practices that you can not deviate from, etc.

E.g. look at the amount of times we all have to re-invent distributed work queues and notifying other systems of something. If we were in the context of physical engineering, there would be maybe 4 options, all with well-understood pros/cons and you just pick the one that fits your performance profile and requirements. Done. And then sure, we could get some "certified engineer" software title where a person can confidently say "yes I sign off that if you use this option, and your estimated load of messages per second never exceeds Y, and you have provisioned X-units of compute on your server, then you will lose less than 0.01% of messages." What an easy job that would be - Except we have countless hipster-devs all wanting to "do it their own way" and write their own library for it.

mitthrowaway22• 2 years ago

Software failure might have increasing stakes these days. The CrowdStrike outage probably had more casualties than THERAC-25. Hospital systems shut down, people couldn't access secure areas with their ID badges, and 911 systems stopped working.

starttoaster• 2 years ago

The thing is, you can hold an engineer that designed a bridge accountable for designing a poor bridge that failed under load. The strength of materials, the load bearing ratings of a particular design for a bridge, can all be calculated and are well known. How do you come up with the same types of calculations for software? You really can't, because writing software is more about designing a solution to problems people aren't already solving. You can write tests for the problems that you are skilled enough to anticipate, or even tests to cover problems you discovered in hindsight of a regression, and sure you can hold software engineers accountable for choosing to bypass the tests they write. But how do you hold a software engineer accountable for a failure mode that nobody considered already? It's like holding the very first person to design a bridge accountable for making a bad bridge, let's see you make a better one.

For that reason, I don't think we'll see software engineers accepting the same level of responsibility for their errors as structural engineers.

kmac_• 2 years ago

Well, the CS program differs slightly between polytechnics and universities. The former emphasizes practical engineering, such as networking details, while the latter focuses more on theory, such as algorithm correctness proofs. I think our job requires a lot of engineering due to reliability, performance, compatibility, communicating design, etc.

thebruce87m• 2 years ago

There are lots of safety critical systems out there with software in them. You probably travelled in one today.

itishappy2• 2 years ago

Code runs our electrical grid, medical devices, internet, shipping, financial systems, early warning radar, etc.

Meanwhile, some accredited mechanical engineer is getting paid to ensure your toilet paper gets perforated correctly.

Workaccount23• 2 years ago

And probably getting paid 1/2 to 1/3 what they would have been making if they skipped college and just crashed coursed javascript.

commandlinefan• 2 years ago

I _think_ I'd like to see software development get some sort of accreditation because... man, there are a lot of people doing it who shouldn't be doing it. But I wonder if that would really do much beyond requiring everybody who worked as a programmer to pay some annual fee and fill out some extra documentation every time they made a change.

stonogo• 2 years ago

This explains why I don't have to worry about who is providing my toilet paper, but must carefully risk-manage all the other things you listed.

petre3• 2 years ago

Not really because much of the older hardware was replaced by software. See PTOs. Current hardware increasingly relies on embedded software. We are using it for payments, driving our vehicles, coordinating railway traffic, flying planes, calculating bridges.

pkaye• 2 years ago

Just give a new title "Software CEO" and then there is no liability to worry about and you get paid a lot more.

seper8• 2 years ago

Interesting. In the Netherlands our prime minister candidate was killed a while ago. Killer was on the street within ten years. Imagine that? Someone killing Kamala Harris and being allowed on the street again after ten years?

Volkert van de Graaf. Look it up...

Compared to that 15 years is quite excessive...

some_random• 2 years ago

I don't think that argument really says what you want it to say about the Netherlands's vs South Africa's approach to sentencing.

petre3• 2 years ago

Killer was on the street within ten years. Imagine that?

Progressive European policies I guess. We'll see Anders Brevik roam free shortly. Maybe he could than meet Volkert van de Graaf and have a chat about their favourite subjects.

ojosilva• 2 years ago

An engineering mistake here could become a huge derailment resulting in loss of hundreds of lives. A 15 year sentence is quite lenient in fact if you think about it.

ranger_danger• 2 years ago

Mistakes happen even without fake credentials, none of which result in 15 year sentences...

Davidp00• 2 years ago

He had started working at Prasa 15 years earlier, shooting up the ranks to become chief engineer, thanks to his fake qualifications.

This is the bit I find remarkable. He actually did the job for 15 years and moved up to chief engineer.

Was he actually a good engineer or did his performance not matter at all for his career progress?

pertymcpert• 2 years ago

TFA says under him they bought trains from Spain that were useless in SA because they were too tall. So...

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

"However, the court in Johannesburg heard that he had only completed his high-school education."

He could have been a "software engineer" no problem. No engineering degree needed.

rldjbpin• 2 years ago

given the demographics here, i can imagine for many of us the first impression was "someone lying on their cv for a tech job got caught".

but "real" engineering (as my core engineer professors used to snark at us) has real-life consequence and many countries have laws for holding their work accountable. this is just an example of that but to save face, they are focusing on their credentials in this case.

as an "engineer" in tech myself, i really feel that our industry misappropriates a lot of these terms, at least for job titles. i am all for naming consistently this way, but we need to also treat what we do in the same lens then. like the recent crowdstrike incident would have also resulted in jailing someone, but not sure if we need to be that serious about it.

Fake CV lands top 'engineer' in jail for 15 years

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