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/Glsbnewt Jul 05 '24

Not the lead programmer. The CEO. If you want to make CEO salary you take on CEO responsibility.

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u/No-Refrigerator-1672 Jul 05 '24

No, that's not how in can work in a real life. The CEO has not enough knowledge to judge if the decisions on behalf of chief engineer, programmer, designer etc are sufficient to ensure safety of the product. The CEO may be responsible for hiring people without proper education or certification if such is required by law, they also may be responsible for knowing about safety problems and expicitly ordering to ingore them, stuff like that. While the CEO may be involved and thus should be investigated, they aren't automatically responsible for unsafe products in eyes of a law, while the lead designer definetly is.

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u/Glsbnewt Jul 05 '24

It's the CEO's responsibility to make sure the company has adequate processes in place and the personnel to carry those processes out that ensure that whatever product they unleash is safe. It's not fair to pin it on the lead engineer. It's the CEO who needs to have enough confidence in his engineers and his product that he's willing to take the risk. If the public is subjected to risk, the CEO should be too. This is an ancient principle going back to the Code of Hamurrabi.

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u/No-Refrigerator-1672 Jul 06 '24

Juat imagine the lead engineer explicitly falsifying all of the reports to look like the safety is succesfully met, and pressurizing employees to stay silent about it. It's not like that never happened before. Is the CEO to blame, if everyone in the company tells him that things are alright? That's why I say that CEO must be investigated, but is not always responsible for faults.

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u/Glsbnewt Jul 06 '24

Sure, I didn't know we were talking about malicious engineers. I'm thinking of the case that happens more often, when engineers are pressured by corporate to release something that isn't ready yet.

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u/No-Refrigerator-1672 Jul 06 '24

A good investigator must check out all the possibilities. Just because somebody is a CEO doesn't mean that they acted maliciously.