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Betrayal Of Trust: When An Engineer Lies

How would you behave if ethical push ever came to shove? That's the question which came to mind when I saw the story, "Engineer Pleads Not Guilty To Perjury." Turns out a New York City inspector approved a bunch of building renovations without really checking them out. Later, rotting support beams trapped and killed two firefighters. Now the engineer is going on trial.

The engineer, Jose D. Vargas, has pleaded not guilty to charges of falsely telling investigators that, yes, he did indeed fully check out the building. You can read the details here. Clearly, Vargas, who's 82 years old, by the way, is at least partly caught up in a search for someone to pin this tragedy on. (The money quote from The New York Times story is from the dead firefighters' lieutenant, who said: "We would like to see somebody pay the price for cutting corners.)

Anyway, so my point is less Vargas's culpability, or lack thereof, than the broader implications of this story. Clearly -- and sadly -- there's a large element of "There but for the grace of God go I" in this story. Meaning that, corners are often cut, yet (fortunately) rarely does this result in the deadly consequences we see here.

Which logically leads to this next thought: In engineering school, we're all taught to behave in a methodical fashion, and to essentially apply scientific principles to everything we do. Even if ethics isn't explicitly taught (though nowadays it usually is), the whole manner in which we're trained to approach the profession, and our work, is steeped in an ethos of doing the right thing.

How, then, does any engineer ever get to the point where they're doing stuff they know is wrong? Sadly, we all know the answer to this one, too. It's the exigencies of the work world. The business and government entities for which we variously toil, which are concerned more with making money, or going along to get along, than with doing the whole job and nothing but the whole job.

Most of us cope with this by telling the little white lies we need to tell to get our managers off of our back, all the while telling ourselves that we'll maintain our ethics when it comes to the stuff that really matters. After a while, for some this dance may become harder to keep up than for others.

Which leads me back to the challenge raised by my opening question: Are you positive you'd behave ethically if, say, your job were on the line? Or, do you worry sometimes, in the wee recesses of your mind, that maybe you'd do what you gotta do to "survive," and then figure out how to live with yourself in the morning, later?

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