I had similar problems with customers as well, especially when the company I worked for was doing sub-contract Safety Case work for a supplier of armoured tractors for the UK MoD!
Neither our customer "wanted to know" when I raised some safety-related "issues" about issues about the tractors and what they were going to be used for in Kandahar province during the time the Royal Engineers were working there to support UK ground forces in the fight against the Taliban, such as the following question: “These vehicles will be used at night with night vision goggles (NVG), and so have the users been trained in using them at night with such goggles?” (if you thought even slightly "hard" about the subject you could foresee a lot of very realistic hazardous situations!) The initial, and for a long time, response was simply that the troops had been trained to use NVG (“and that was good enough”) – but, as the Safety Case Engineer on the project, I could not “let go” of the issue until I considered that it was well on the way to being dealt with. It took about a year, but, finally, “someone” in the Army decided that they would have to do night-time trials with those vehicles using NVG, and I think that they were then “rather surprised” to find out that there were a lot of unforeseen and hazardous issues with trying to use them under the typical operating conditions – so much so that they mandated that similar trials should be performed on any vehicle type to be used with NVG. There were also a number of other, sometimes less potentially serious, hazard issues with those projects that I did not “let go of” until I considered they were well on the way to being solved, and, generally, they were. You could say that I had been “vindicated”, but all the above cut little ice with the MoD project team or our direct sub-contract customer, and the latter then stated emphatically that they did not want me working on any future safety case project for them! That, of course, made me “less than popular” with my own company’s management, and resulted in my being given little or no new “chargeable” work for most of the rest of the time I worked for them, which, in turn, made my situation there far more stressful L. “Ethics” versus “personal survival”??? John E Allen W. London, UK -----Original Message----- From: Cortland Richmond [mailto:k...@earthlink.net] Sent: 27 December 2016 00:35 To: EMC-PSTC@LISTSERV.IEEE.ORG Subject: Re: [PSES] Practical ethics? -- text version One problem for engineers is that they work for people whose intent is to make money, and who are remarkably resistant to spending any more than is necessary to barely meet requirements and get products on the market. That is actually forgivable; what isn't forgivable is a willingness to accept not meeting performance, regulatory, or even safety requirements, accepting settlements and fines as part of the cost of doing business to make a little more on each unit that goes out the door. I wonder if ethics classes are doing anything to fix that. Ethics Lesson: Many years ago, late at night, an armed helicopter landed at a base where I was stationed, with a radio problem that kept the pilot from talking to troops under attack. I was unable to fix the problem no matter what I replaced, and over the next few days, no one else in our maintenance shop could figure it out either. But soldiers probably died that night because their close air support was gone. Finally, I had the crew-chief run the rotor speed up to what the pilot had reported and, at some risk to myself, followed the cabling the length of the airframe until I found one assembly at the tip of the tail fin, right next to the spinning rotor, where the RF was being interrupted and reflected. Taking it inside to the test bench, I discovered an internal capacitor lead had crystallized and broken, and -- at just one engine setting -- the ends of the break were vibrating enough to render radio transmissions unintelligible. I might take some pride in finding that when nobody else could -- but people may have died because I was too tired, too lazy, or just not thinking well enough to to try that earlier. Died. That's an ethics class no one should have to take. Three rubber grommets could have prevented it, and I wonder how much was saved by leaving them out... How many wounded or dead (if any) I can't say. I once shut down a manager complaining an AED's EMC Test Plan I'd been contracted to write was too hard to pass and too expensive to meet. Never mind that the requirements had been increased, and all their own engineers were busy bringing existing products up to the new standard; when he asked why I'd made the test so hard I told him: "I don't want you to kill people whose lives you're trying to save." Ethics -- the hard way. Cortland Richmond -- 26 December 2016 > - ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message is from the IEEE Product Safety Engineering Society emc-pstc discussion list. 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