[HN Gopher] Fake CV lands top 'engineer' in jail for 15 years
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Fake CV lands top 'engineer' in jail for 15 years
Author : cwwc
Score : 80 points
Date : 2024-09-04 18:46 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Not a software engineer, fyi.
| buran77 wrote:
| "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.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _" 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.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| The school I went to was 80% mechanical engineers. Had they
| offered computer engineering, as compared to computer
| science, my degree would have had more overlap with
| physical science than virtual science (of computer
| engineering).
|
| It's just not a practical degree in the US. You don't need
| thermodynamics, statics, and a bunch of other physical
| engineering requirements to build software.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I am not aware of the US having any laws on who can call
| themselves Engineer or not - it's not like Canada. Having a
| printer and a sheet of business card blanks entitles me to
| call myself an engineer.
| avhon1 wrote:
| It's legislated by individual states. A well-known
| example is Mats Jarlstrom in Oregon, USA.
|
| https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-
| traffic-li...
| bee_rider wrote:
| That press release seems to be specifically about their
| failure to get him to stop using the term "engineer," and
| the fact that the legal system recognizes a difference
| between it and the more protected term "professional
| engineer."
| bitfilped wrote:
| Computer Science is a science degree, not an engineering
| one.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The core of classic engineering is learning how to work
| with Mother Nature OS. In software engineering you almost
| never have to deal with that absolute gut punch of an OS
| (usually at worst you just have to deal with the humans who
| are a product of it), and don't need to take classes to
| learn about it.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| 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.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| I use the title because it's what the piece of paper my
| university gave me when I graduated says. "Programming" is
| a portion of my job, alongside reviewing other people's
| work, design, and sitting around in meetings with people
| who don't have technical knowledge. Any mechanical,
| electrical, civil, etc, engineer will have a similar
| experience in many cases, except replace "programming" with
| something related to their area
| crawfishphase wrote:
| professional engineer license is required in addition to
| graduating and other prerequisites to be called
| "professional engineer" tho, no? school alone is not
| enough to be designated a "professional engineer", right?
| mlhpdx wrote:
| And with respect to professional engineers there is this
| obscure little tidbit[1]. There is nothing of the sort in
| software as far as I know.
|
| [1] https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-
| ethics/engineers-...
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Engineering involves using repeatable processes to generate
| expected results. 99% of computer programming activity
| doesn't meet that mark.
| bitwize wrote:
| Indeed. Programming is just a translation step. If you have
| done your information system design properly, it will have
| undergone several phases of stepwise refinement from
| requirements to code, with documents and flowcharts
| explaining the logic.
|
| Sadly, programmers have been doing too much of the design
| work in recent decades, and the result has been akin to
| "the inmates running the asylum".
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Fraud lands...
| Terr_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.)
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| What if he outsourced his work to actual engineers?..
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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.
| petre wrote:
| Outsource what, influence peddling? Good riddance.
| marcel_hecko wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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.
| drbig wrote:
| 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.
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| > earning an annual salary of about 2.8m rand ($156,000;
| PS119,000).
|
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 600m rand is about $34 million. If "dozens" means at least 24
| trains, that seems... surprisingly cheap per train, especially
| for government spending?
| observationist wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I bet this guy still made better decisions than any AI as well.
| arp242 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Should have gone into politics.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Do employers actually check references and claimed qualifications
| anymore? Or do you just have to do well at solving interview
| puzzles?
| massysett wrote:
| Yes, my employer routinely calls references before hiring, and
| as a supervisor I have answered many reference calls regarding
| former employees.
| bdcravens wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Software is simply too complex. The complexity is mitigated
| with abstraction, but the abstracted code quickly becomes
| complex again, and it once again gets abstracted.
|
| Layer this a bunch of times and you get to where the
| regular SWE is working.
|
| However, that doesn't mean we cannot have bug-free code. It
| just means that code would have to be written close to
| hardware, likely by a team fluent in both hardware
| execution and software architecture.
| ahepp wrote:
| I can certainly see that there are some fundamental issues
| with assigning software engineers the level of
| responsibility that structural engineers have.
|
| That said, from what I've heard, crowdstrike seems like a
| great example of something a hypothetical licensed software
| engineer should lose their license for. I admit I don't
| know all the details, but it seems that an update was
| pushed to prod that immediately broke all windows machines.
| Doesn't that mean they pushed an update to customers
| without testing it even a single time, on a single windows
| machine? I heard they even bypassed customer staging
| environments?
|
| I also find it interesting to consider what the future
| holds. A few possible paths seem like:
|
| 1) The state of the profession progresses to the point
| where we have enough widely recognized best practices to
| make licensure meaningful
|
| 2) We consider the benefits of rapid, cheap(er than the
| alternative), software production as being greater than the
| costs of crowdstrike level events, and change nothing
|
| 3) We adapt software system architectures on the customer
| side so that there's meaningful oversight and
| accountability inside an organization (in many ways
| enabling #1)
| josephg wrote:
| Using phased rollouts of updates has been a thing for well
| over a decade at this point. Microsoft uses phased rollouts
| for windows updates. Google does the same for chrome. To
| say nothing of proper testing and fuzzing.
|
| It's not a mystery why crowdstrike brought down so many
| companies and got people killed. Their engineering
| practices were foreseeable bad and people died as a result.
| Wah wah software is complicated. So what? That's why you
| learn to do it properly before you install your software in
| hospitals and airports.
|
| Learn to take responsible for the outcome of your work.
| Software is complex, yes. Keeping that complexity in check
| is what software engineers are trained for and hired for.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| In practice, engineers are not sent to jail only if the
| bridge they designed falls. They are sent to jail or
| punished otherwise if it is shown in a court or similar
| investigative process that they intentionally or
| unintentionally failed to follow standards or reasonable
| foreseeable precautions.
|
| The same can very easily and must exist for software
| engineers. Some body comes up with a set of safety and
| security standards, and all the licensed engineers ensure
| the software under their wing conforms to those standards.
|
| Software engineers will accept this responsibility when
| eventually governments pass laws regarding this, as they
| have done for other professions. It just takes time.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| "Real" engineers do new things too, where there may be un-
| anticipated failure modes, and where the answer can't just
| be looked up from a book of standards. Things like boring
| the world's longest tunnel under a mountain with sparsely
| available geological samples, building passenger trains
| that beat the world speed record, building reusable space
| rockets, and so on. Software engineers aren't the only ones
| solving novel and complex problems, and failure is
| sometimes understandable.
|
| You don't lose your license if you fail at solving a hard
| problem, where nobody has succeeded before. But to be
| granted the responsibility to attempt those problems you
| have to demonstrate experience, education, and competence.
| You lose your license if you demonstrate disregard for
| ethics, basic safety standards, recordkeeping, and so on. I
| don't see why software engineering can't, in principle,
| have a similar level of professionalism, especially when
| critical systems are being built on top of it. But it would
| strongly conflict with the ethos of anarchy, moving-fast-
| and-breaking-things, and autodidact garage hacker culture
| that permeates the field (and which software engineering
| has greatly benefitted from).
| kmac_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There are lots of safety critical systems out there with
| software in them. You probably travelled in one today.
| itishappy wrote:
| 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| And probably getting paid 1/2 to 1/3 what they would have
| been making if they skipped college and just crashed coursed
| javascript.
| itishappy wrote:
| I resemble that remark.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| 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.
| techwizrd wrote:
| NCEES attempted to create an accreditation scheme in the US
| for Software Engineering, but canceled it because few
| people took the exam [0].
|
| It's not surprising that almost no one took the exam. It
| wasn't well publicized and employers do not require an FE
| or PE for software engineers. You also have to pass the FE.
| The closest relevant prerequisite was the FE in Electrical
| and Computer Engineering, which most CS coursework would
| not cover. And you need to spend 4 years working under a
| licensed PE. Ill-conceived and executed.
|
| 0: https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-
| engineerin...
| petre wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Just give a new title "Software CEO" and then there is no
| liability to worry about and you get paid a lot more.
| seper8 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| petre wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Davidp00 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| TFA says under him they bought trains from Spain that were
| useless in SA because they were too tall. So...
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