Wow we went from handling a call-out to ruining an employee's life.

I'm not sure what you have going on in your head, but it doesn't have any resemblance to reality.

Except there's no involuntary unemployed engineers. Why not open the career section of the paper and just see how in demand mechanical and electrical engineers are. In the height of the GFC they were in demand, and now they are still in demand. Stop comparing this situation to some unskilled labourer you're not helping your arguement.

You're making excuses for someone who acted against the ethics of the profession. Just remember that next time your children go to the doctor and don't get the right treatment because of budget cuts and management. (See what I did there? Think of the children!) Oh what? The oaths can apply to one profession but not the other? Please.

I don't think so. Ethical does not mean "thou shall not kill". Am I working on a device intended on killing others, or am I working on a device intended on saving our own?

I think the word ethical here is a bit of a catch. Ethical doesn't necessarily mean a religious following of one's beliefs, but rather the code of ethics I signed are based around the tenants of demonstrating integrity, practising competently, exercising leadership, and promoting sustainability. Part of exercising leadership is that you can not sign your rights away to non engineers. Where I live this is actually covered under law. I as a registered engineer can't have a manager sign away liability for something I know is not safe, I can only sign that away to another engineer, and only to another engineer who is competent in understanding what is being signed (practising competently).

I know not every country holds the engineering profession to this high standard but the way I see it, even if in this case the engineers in question fixed the problem, they helped sweep it under the rug for management and I have no problem with them being grilled in a public forum for it.

There's a reason for this. The button on the stereo doesn't move. In fact I can mute the stereo without even moving my hands, just push the button on the steering wheel using my thumb. Even on the old bomb car we have here using a stereo is intuitive. I have tactile feedback that can tell me which button I'm pressing and when I've pressed it without ever taking my eyes off the road. I'd also wager that your typical car has less buttons, or even less total functions than there are letters in the alphabet.

Now please tell me why you think that this is comparable distraction.

Here's a thought, a trend doesn't need to reverse for it to be affected. Yes accident rates are declining. I'd wager they'd decline faster if people spent less time staring at their phones while driving.

But hey you know better than all the research right?

Think embedded. A device in complete sleep state can be powered for eons on a battery. Waking, doing whatever it needs to do and then going back to sleep waiting for the next interrupt is critical to battery life. In the micro-controller world the difference in battery life of 2 seconds of wake-up time can mean the difference between swapping out your batteries in a day or in a year. I have not very fond memories of counting how many cycles various assembly instructions will take to ensure the CPU on small micro controllers isn't awake for more than a few microseconds to meet some power requirements. The prospect of running a small linux machine the same way is quite interesting.

20min vs multi-hour flight times. You do not want to use quads for search and rescue unless the search area is VERY small.

Search and rescue is not about flying down in between trees or careful manoeuvring, it's about flying high and getting an areal view of any signs of life. As for your definition of "decent search radius" in the reply below, a person can walk out of linear range of a quadrocopter in about 2 hours, and that's not taking into account moving back and forward or searching a grid.

Typical search areas are in the orders of hundreds of square km. You'll be there all year with your quad searching that area.

Sorry you're scaring me now. Are you saying there's a scenario where you would make a change to a WMD without a form of change control?

I'm sure I missread what you were intending to write but if not, please tell me which country you are so I can stay the heck away.

So am I. I'm a chartered engineer and registered with the government in my country as all engineers are required to be. That charter requires amongst other things to act ethically in the profession at all times and that is actually something that I signed.

See that's how "professional" jobs work in countries which treat them as a profession. Not just engineers either, medical professionals in this country typically display signed copies of the hippocratic oath on their wall too. That's the difference between building something, and working as a professional, and I'm quite sad for you.

As for killing people? I worked in defence briefly. My job was actually protecting people by building instruments of war. You're not ethically bound to ensure your device can't ever harm, just that it doesn't harm the user when used as intended. If you actually killed one of the people using your device as intended then you should be in jail.

No we're not talking unskilled workers here. An engineer even in the middle of the GFC could have easily stood up and left their employer and found work in short notice.

No people don't hold that value in general. That's what sets most professions apart from engineering. In many countries around the world a professional engineer needs to be registered with the government and can't sign away any responsibilities to anyone other than another professional engineer. The responsibility of the profession is that you act ethically at all times. If you can't do that, and you worry about feeding your children (oh the poor think of the children comment, do you work for Fox News by chance?) then you should change profession to something less demanding on your weak mind.

Also there are ways of saying no to management without your poor children going foodless.

No it was not either or. It is never either or. See part of this thing called ethics is to not act unethically at the request of others. It's part of the charter of being a professional engineer. If you can't say NO to the people who are paying you then you have absolutely no business being a professional engineer.

Quite the opposite actually.

Do you staff an operation 24 hours to have people sit on their arses doing nothing? Or do you staff during the day and provide on-call support for rare occasions when something goes wrong?

The former will land you a one way ticket to bankruptcy in the face of competition who can make sensible staffing decisions. Your complaints about running things on the cheap is really falling flat when I see almost weekly instances in the news paper of more job losses, and more companies shutting down and moving production elsewhere.

Right so your argument boils down to:

Phones provide information for plebs and access for experts to do some serious debugging.
Computers provide access for experts to do some serious debugging.

Therefore computers are better.

Thanks I've heard enough.

Not a hero. An engineer has a responsibility to act ethically. It's part of what makes the profession ... err professional. A cover up to save face of management is not something that should have been done under any circumstance.

And following on that I fully expect software engineers to be held to account in a similar way. If the Heartbleed bug was silently fixed and then historical logs messed with to make it look like it never existed in the first place then the person responsible should have their name in lights.

Professional Engineers have an obligation to act ethically, not an obligation to be right all the time. Software engineers and other professionals in the IT industry should be held to the same account.