That is outrageous. The company owners have limited liability protections. The employees should receive at least that unless they are in a position that requires specific legal training like an engineer legislatively appointed to be responsible for some safety function. Where they are appointed and remunerated specifically for their legal responsibility, in other words.
And the court cases after WWII are hardly reliable precedent. They were basically making it up as they went with fairly flimsy justification apart from the fact they had a bunch of troops still in fighting form.
> That is outrageous. The company owners have limited liability protections.
The owners have limited financial liability, not limited legal liability.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability
> Limited liability is a legal status in which a person's financial liability is limited to a fixed sum, most commonly the value of a person's investment in a corporation, company or partnership.
> That is outrageous.
And this is why software engineering is a joke.
Software engineers are not lawyers and they are bad at interpreting laws.
If the product of your engineering directly enables unethical actions, yes, you should bear some of the responsibility for it.
Right, so if something seems sketchy ("please ignore these specific deductions when calculating our holdings") , get a lawyer - or CEO or CFO or whatever - to say in writing that it's fine.
And if something seems actually illegal ("just run the blood test results out-of-spec and report them anyway") just don't do it. Nothing absolves you of some things.
The practical answer is that it's because we do want to discourage criminals from "splitting liability" by having most of a gang doing some illegal goal together stay "clean" and only delegating a single "fall guy" for the final touch; so criminal law is explicitly written to consider everyone who knowingly assists a crime to be partly liable as well.
'Hi mate. We just bought this rebar from Alibaba, saved as a ton of money. Could you sign here real quick? We need to finish that bridge!'
No one has had their engineer title taken away for being a crook, as far as I know. Unless the crooked thing they did was fake their diploma.
Titles won't fix this.
This seems an absurd claim, unless you're going to get very pedantic about some distinction between "engineer title" and "legal right to function as an engineer".
> https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/engineer-s-licence-revoked-after...
This is one example found after just a few seconds of searching, but it is absolutely commonplace to have your engineering license revoked for carrying out criminal activity.
> In those jurisdiction where it's a protected title, it just implies that you have some mix of STEM topics in your degree.
This seems a bizarre claim too. In jurisdictions where membership of a professional licensing body is necessary in order to refer to oneself as an engineer and practice as an engineer, it is absolutely not the case that all you need is the right "mix of STEM topics in your degree". It means you have a certain degree, have completed a set amount of work experience, have completed a professional certification exam and then maintain that license, which may require meeting other requirements periodically. And yes, "not being a crook" is certainly one of those requirements, and being involved in major criminal activity, especially criminal activity related to your professional practice, is absolutely grounds for having your license and certification as an engineer revoked.
This seems pretty unambiguous though. Sometimes you're just facilitating breaking the law, or making things dangerously unsafe.
Are you serious? Make sure your ass is covered if you're doing illegal shit for your company, because they're never looking out for you over the org.
Yep.
"comprehensive knowledge of their companies media output" is an interesting way to put it. I would really just recommend engineers maintain some sense of self awareness.
This might be a reasonable argument in a vacuum, except that:
> [SBF] told investors and prospective investors that FTX had top-notch, sophisticated automated risk measures in place to protect customer assets, that those assets were safe and secure, and that Alameda was just another platform customer with no special privileges. [emphasis added]
And also:
> Bankman-Fried also told investors, and directed other FTX and Alameda employees to tell investors, that Alameda received no preferential treatment from FTX. For example, Bankman-Fried told the Wall Street Journal in or around July 2022: “There are no parties that have privileged access.” Likewise, in a Bloomberg article published in or about September 2022, Bankman-Fried claimed that “Alameda is a wholly separate entity” than FTX. In the same article, Ellison is quoted as stating about Alameda: “We’re at arm’s length and don’t get any different treatment from other market makers.” Bankman-Fried made similar statements directly to investors. [emphasis added]
(The above are direct quotes from the SEC complaint [1] against SBF.)
Singh might argue that he wasn't aware of the private statements to investors. But the WSJ and Bloomberg stories show the "arm's length" claim was something they consistently messaged to the public at the highest levels. To argue that Alameda's role as market maker of last resort justified a privileged status would be inconsistent with all their prior public claims to the contrary. "We lied to the public repeatedly about our risk management" isn't a defense; it's a confession.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2022/comp-pr2022-2...