Accidents happen.
No human beings are perfect. We learn from mistakes, and that’s how we improve.
Mistakes happen a lot in the engineering industry. Sometime we make hypothesis, and it might turn out wrong. The engineering and technology industry has room for mistakes and accidents. However, it shouldn’t occur in production and public stage, only in testing and prototyping phase. In engineering, we has various testings for a reason: it is so that such potential accidents do not happen in the real world. If technical accidents happen in the public, it is the fault of the leadership for failing to be cautious and detailed 100% of the time, especially when some executives decide to overlook small mistakes that could turn out to be big.
There might be moments when someone knows that there is a mistake and that if a product might be harmful to the user, but the higher up decides not to disclose the information. I don’t blame the executives; sometimes it is hard to admit problems as the company and the brand image might be tainted. For example, Samsung had a explosive battery failure with the Galaxy Note 7 and device protection issues with Galaxy Fold. Instances like these hurt the company. However, they eventually admitted to their mistakes and recalled the devices. Yet, there are companies that might not do these acts, and it could be people in the lower positions who are aware of the problems to speak out. Sometimes, they are not obligated to speak out. They should be obligated to know the impact of the issues and act upon their moral values. If it is a small glitch that is not harmful, it doesn’t need to be pointed out to the public. However, if that small glitch can kill several hundreds of people, then by all means, they should speak out.
In the case that they are silent, I am sure that by their conscious, they are feeling guilty. Even people are have witness a crime but didn’t say anything could be arrested. Engineers should think what would they do as if they or their close ones were the ones getting negatively impacted by the engineering disasters. Whistleblowing to a certain extent should be deemed heroic IF it was something serious. Whistleblowing furthermore should be done in such way more damage is not created. For example, revealing national security could impact our nation from our enemies. It could also get messy if the ‘mistake’ was purposely carried out for a greater good. For example, the military ‘accidentally’ killed 10 civilians. But what if from those 10 people was a terrorist who could have killed 1000 people. There are different levels of worthiness for whistleblowers. I would say whistleblowing however should be done when the impact of the benefit is twice as much as the impact of the damage. I don’t blame people who can’t whistleblow for things that have similar levels of benefit and damage, especially when their career is at stake. Particularly for the older people who have families to support.
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