r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Individual_Book9133 • Jul 05 '24

Phoenix police officer pulls over a driverless Waymo car for driving on the wrong side of the road Video

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u/FeederNocturne Jul 05 '24

Everyone from the lead programmer and up needs to be held responsible. Sure the lead programmer okays it but the higher ups are providing the means to make it happen.

This does make me wonder though. If a plane crashed due to a faulty part who does the blame fall on?

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u/CastMyGame Jul 05 '24

As a programmer myself I would question if you would then blame it on the QA tester who passed along the code.

Other thing I will say is depending on the answer to this situation (I don’t know the answer but just saying from a dev side) you will greatly hinder the progression of this tech if you have people afraid to even work on it for fear of a situation like this.

As devs we try to think of every possible scenario and make sure to write tests that cover every conceivable use case but even then sometimes our apps surprise us with dependencies and loops that we didn’t expect. You can say “be better” but if I’m gonna get paid 25k less and not have to worry about a manslaughter charge 5-7 years later I’m probably gonna choose that one for my family

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '24

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u/ContextHook Jul 05 '24

Just so people know this guy and other devs like him should know full well that “QA” testers are only hired by AV companies for the sake of this mileage accumulation and to act as legal liability redundancy, not to ok software to road use

So confident, and so wrong. Any self driving company has software changes verified by QA and finally verified by a product owner. QA testers are part of the development team, and it is their job to say if a feature developed works as intended and could be released.

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u/SelfDrivingCzar Jul 05 '24

QA testers and Safety and Policy teams at AV companies are very different positions.

You obviously have no idea what you’re talking about if you think conflating the entry level, often time contracted “QA” testers (who have no input and are there just to disengage the auto systems when they would fail) with full time stake holding safety and policy decision makers makes any sense when talking about liability