Engineers (both inside and outside NASA) knew, a priori, that the failure rate of the Shuttle would result in a loss of mission and/or lives in rates between “one in dozens” to “one in hundreds” of launches, not the “one in a million” BS spouted by politicians and NASA administrators. (for more information, see Feynman’s second autobiography).
Should they have been charged with malpractice? No, because the policy makers and management refused to listen to the engineers.
The same thing will likely come out in investigations here. Management didn’t listen to engineers.
The reason why I quit engineering is because I grew tired of sacrificing my nights and weekends to clean up after management’s ideas of charging ahead, regardless of consequences warned of previously. Almost every engineer, in almost all disciplines of engineering, can tell you all about what it is like to tell management “Uh, that’s not such a wise idea,” only to be ignored. Repeatedly.
Me too - but I went into consulting [telecom]. When they are paying you big bucks, they tend to listen to you more ...
As for corporate engineering, I always remember the line by Tommy Lee Jones in Under Siege:
"I got sick and tired of coming up with last-minute desperate solutions to impossible problems created by other fucking people ..."
“Almost every engineer, in almost all disciplines of engineering, can tell you all about what it is like to tell management “Uh, that’s not such a wise idea,” only to be ignored. Repeatedly.”
This is SO damn true.
This is why I work on my own most of the time via contracts. When the idiots screw things up, I get paid more. If they want to blame me for their problems, fine, I find work elsewhere. Fortunately, I found steady work that is hybrid research/development/panic-mode “get it done yesterday” projects :-)! It’s like the best of all worlds and I haven’t been happier with my career to date (I have to admit I like the pressure of getting something done fast that is both high quality and, well, cool :-) ).
It took a ton of hard work and life lessons to get there though. I honestly cannot see why most engineering companies are not small/mid sized ... it seems the larger they are, the more detached management becomes from understanding what it takes to develop working solutions. Of course, these managers usually label the more vocal engineers “primadonnas”, but I usually wear that as a badge of honor when it comes from one of those buffoons. Now if someone I respected called me that, I would question myself immediately :-)!
I spent the summers of 2002 and 2003 mopping up various forms of garbage due to poor managerial decisions. While I got a TON of valuable experience from that, I question if it was worth burning myself out for a little over a year. In the end, at least a few people I know got to keep their jobs for a while ... but man that was one insane year working 24/7.
The sickening VP of Engineering took a lot of credit for our hard work ... the moron was the one who made the wrong decisions in the first place. Virtually all of us moved on to another company shortly after that fiasco. Mr. VP got canned about a year after that. What’s good for engineering in general is that I hear he is still unemployed and really wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer ... he’s the kind of fool that could convert a golden parachute into corroded tin in no time.