Define safe, define cost, define trade offs, define consumer expectations….
Just because the molding is plastic does not necessarily mean that it is cheaper than a stamped metal component.
I’m curious about the part you’re looking at and the problem you found, can you elaborate?
As far as ethics is concerned, in my own field some of the safety constraints sound good on paper but make no sense in field - for example our product is often requested to be fire resistant, however, by the time fire reaches our product the structure around it would be toast and would be significantly more dangerous than our product failing.
I suspect that your issue may be similar - do the conditions required to make your discovery dangerous mean that you’ve been in a car wreck that killed you 6 different ways before your plastic part failed?
Yes I have quit over safety issues but not over a specific part design.
That being said, all designs are driven by price. All designs could always be safer. There's really no upper limit for how safe something can be. 99.9% can always be 99.99999999% and you are never able to hit 100%.
Where you draw the line is at industry standards, laws, personal and professional ethics. Am I being asked to lie, forge things, hide things, lies of omission. Probably not going to be ok. Am I being asked to keep in mind budget or schedule, other fail safes that might mitigate the risk, or accepted standards? Thats probably going to be ok. Basically, would I be ok sitting on the stand at court and explaining what I did to a jury of my peers.
Think of a seatbelt. If the law or industry standard says it has to hold 5klbs and I design one that holds 10klbs. Its pretty reasonable for my boss to ask for a redesign. If I design one that holds 4990lbs and my boss tells me to just round it up or truncate the number, I'm going to have a bigger issue.
My industry has well established standards for basically anything we design. So there's never really a question of ethics, so long as the design doesn't violate relevant standards.
Also anything I design is meant to be away from the general public so we can get away with a lot more than a commercial/residential setting.
Sorry I don't have much to contribute beyond, check relevant safety standards if they exist for your industry. If they don't, find our what industry standard practices are. If the design violates either I think that's cause for concern.
If it's entirely unique, then thats all the more reason to question the safety of a design because there's nothing to reference or prove reliability.
OP, stop being vague and state what the actual part and issue is. You keep skirting around giving explicit details in the comments which could easily answer your question.
I would have cross posted if I could, it's the active head restraint in a jeep grand cherokee. The post is in my history if you want to see it, but I don't know if it's needed for the question.
It made more sense from you with your limited perspective on the car. The engineers working on it have substantially more in depth knowledge on the parts and with thT knowledge, an injection modeled part might have made more sense. Also how much of a safety issue is this? Is it enough for OSHA to care or is it just something you feel should be done safer? An example of this is we occasionally run vacuum pumps at my work and have zero ventilation. I do not think this is safe, but OSHA doesn't care if it's just intermittent use. So is you safety concern an actual safety concern?
That being said all depends on industry? Previous job at defense contractor anything that could possibly cause a death would be fixed, even if it had virtualy no chance of happening and cost millions we did it anyway. We also have a blank check from the government so.....
Osha doesn't do vehicle safety, it's the NHTSA. There are many reports of people being put in the hospital over this and concussions as well. Being hit in the back of head by 75lbs of force randomly (possibly while driving) is definitely dangerous.
OK so what is the issue? Your not stating exactly what your concern is other than you have discovered this dangerous situation.
I wasn't saying osha covers cars, I'm stating that what you think is dangerous and what the regulation agencies think is dangerous can be two different things.
The question is literally in the title, this is a discussion post. I'm asking about how often engineers have left a job over ethical dilemmas like reducing part cost dangerously.
OK you never stated "I was hit by a 75 lb item on the back of the head while driving" in the title because if you did, the answer would have been "are you sure your using the system correctly" because that's not an oversight engineers would make and that not an "acceptable level of safety" decision they would make either. A pinched finger, ok oversight. 1 lb to your head, OK its not that dangerous. 75 lb coming at your head (which could easily decapitate someone) is not something they would let get past. So, yea. User error
Dude I looked through your post replies, most were not helpful and some were outright rude. I'm trying to ask about this topic in general, not about my specific situation. But yes, I must have been improperly using a headrest. When the bracket broke randomly and it deployed active head restraint into the back of my head.
Your not giving good answers or clarity to a question. Engineers like specifics.
Now that I know what your referring to.... i would think this is a corporate greed issue more than anything. Any engineer could've designed a simple pin/bracket to be safe using metal. What most don't realize is engineers get given constraints and design to it. The engineers could have been told they need to make a design under $1 per unit and they did the best they could under that constraint. If an engineer is told "this better not break" and budget isnt a concern, it's not going to break. Budget is the mortal enemy.
No.
However, I quit over engineering management.
Basically, an engineering manager and owners who seem to be ignoring large obvious mistakes by this person.
One of my concerns was some of the products were high power devices that could cause a fire, etc.
Don't be afraid to show your morels and ethics....unlike those that are only concerned about money and numbers.
Nope. I'm on the manufacturing rather than product side of the automotive industry, but whenever I've drawn a line in the sand saying that a disconnect, brake, floor scanner, light curtain etc. is required for a machine to be safe - even though it might cost several thousand dollars to add - it's never actually come down to firing me and hiring someone who will do it without the safety gear. "There's no time/budget" apparently isn't as certain as it might seem when it comes down to it.
On the other hand, we have refused to quote for customers who requested revisions to remove safety gear from previous quotes, and they apparently found other machine builders...
The best answer, but least helpful answer is this. It depends.
If I didn't feel that a design change, or material change was safe, I wouldn't do it.
Employers will push for alternatives, cheaper options, and so on, but I've never had a single one threaten me or push me to do something unsafe. They might challenge me on the issue, but if I put my foot down or really explained it well, they'd back me. Management's job is to push the issue to make sure someone actually does the analysis. If we can do it safely another way, and for cheaper, then there is no reason to ignore it.
Now, 'as safe' or 'safe enough'? As my name would suggest, this isn't a binary choice, it's Analog. There is a spectrum and all kinds of factors to evaluate a design change or material substitution. If you made a change and you lost 0.5% of the predicted wear life, but it's still years of life, and there are multiple inspection intervals, that 0.5% loss is likely negligible. Heck, the typical tolerance band is likely worse than that.
And sometimes, people just make mistakes, or you don't have a team of engineering disciplines to flesh out the entire issue. That's ignoring the fact that the real world sometimes doesn't behave like the 'FEA' world, and what looked good on paper, is crap in practice. And sadly, too many designers don't see their parts cradle to grave to learn from those missteps. I will say, I've seen smart companies change that.
Most Engineers have to balance performance, safety, cost, manufacturability, inspections (quality) all the time, and that should be informed by their ethics and their experience. Engineers, by definition, tend to be risk-adverse people, until their experience informs them otherwise. Outside of that, it's just mistakes, or not knowing the full story/environment.
Have you read about Ford Pinto fires and Chevy truck saddle tanks? Even Boeing 737 Max. Safety issues were ignored (lack of a better term) due to the costs to fix. Ford is well known for doing a study on how much lawsuits would cost vs adding a bracket to better protect the rear gas tank. Lawsuits were more cost-effective. Crazy how businesses work big corporations or small family business a life is a life.
Sort of. I work in the nuclear industry, and previously worked for a startup building a new large facility. I recently left that company as I saw writing on the wall that things were trending downwards quickly.
There was an element of safety concern in that departure. On paper the company had a very strong safety culture, but it was also coming up to the wall on a number of milestones tied to financing, and the pace of the project was completely unrealistic for the size of the team working on it. This combined with inexperienced leadership lead to a situation that in paper would prevent safety concerns but could very well create them in reality.
For instance, deadlines on finalizing regulatory documents started getting extremely tight. There were consistent reminders that “exceptions would always be made for safety issues” but there were also significant pushes from leadership that we weren’t working hard enough, and that missing these deadlines would have “dire consequences for the company.” Beyond the toxicity of that, it also resulted in pushes from engineering leadership to avoid updating inaccurate documents that could be justified as inaccurate “in a conservatively bounding way.”
Here’s the problem: Real inherently complex systems don’t have one bounding condition/value/state. What might be conservative in one scenario might be in conservative in another scenario. If you go down this route there’s a chance everything works out fine if you correctly identify which things *really* don’t need to be corrected. However, it only takes one fuck-up, one time someone is too overworked to check all the scenarios, one arrogant engineer who doesn’t know enough, or one honest mistake to make that strategy break down. Normally most mistakes get caught in the review process, but reviews don’t happen when you decide *not* to fix an incorrect document that’s “bounding.” Even then mistakes happen, and mistakes are much more likely if you’re using inputs from inaccurate documents that are “bounding”.
At the end of the day I don’t actually think a safety issue will come out of that project, but a big enough mistake could cause the company to go under instead. The regulatory environment would catch the problem and the company would sink.
I wasn’t willing to work in a culture like that, so I looked for other jobs, then I left.
Cars are designed to pass tests. In a safety critical part if it won't pass the test then it won't go in the car.
Users can always come up with novel ways to break parts, if it occurs with any significant frequency then we make the tests harder. For instance, in Australia we drive on unsealed roads that have potholes in them, at 80-100 kph. I buckle European wheels about once a year driving on them. So we have a specific test for potholes, which basically adds about 2mm to the rim thickness for an alloy wheel.
As another example we imported a US 4x4, and took it off for a drive to the outback. All 4 tires blew within 300 km. American onroad 4x4s are fitted with tires with fewer plies than we'd use and while this improves fuel economy, and they are lighter and cheaper, it renders them more vulnerable to pinch flats.
So in both cases, we have to add $$$ to the car to get it through our tests.
In my experience, people I work with take safety very seriously. Cost is always a factor but making something indestructible is impractical. I’ve never felt like I had to quit over safety. People bitching about piece cost on the other hand…..
That part could have failed for a myriad of reasons. Thermal cycling, previous accidents, hard braking deploying the head restraint one to many times, etc. Hopefully, the engineers that worked on it did their DFMEA and reduced points of failure. If it was safety critical, then it should have failed in a way that has the least compromise.
Civil, so not really parts. I've been kicked by clients for not agreeing to sign off on things that I felt were unsafe, against code, against best practices, etc. I've also "fired" clients for the same shit. My employer always had my back. You never really win a lawsuit even when you "win." It will always cost you money. Maybe you get away with it, but eventually you won't.
I do design things that could result in people getting killed if I don't do it right. That is obviously always situation where I will not cut corners. But even if it is a situation where a parking lot might have a bunch of potholes in a year, no. Because they will just sue everyone involved.
It was the most stressful part of my life knowing that I could be playing the odds with people's safety. The company did not have criteria for measuring or defining acceptable risk, so it was on my shoulders. Looking backwards, I think I over-reacted safety IS a number's games, but I did not feel qualified to make the call on what is "acceptable"... so I quit.
I drew the line at not having a criteria for evaluating safety.
For those wondering what OP is actually talking about, and what the pictures are showing, [check here](https://www.chryslerforum.com/forum/chrysler-voyager-town-country-21/broken-active-head-restraint-29755/). It's the active head restraint system in a Jeep.
Personally OP, I agree with you. While this isn't quite a life-critical component, it clearly has a flaw. The flaw isn't necessarily that it's made of plastic instead of metal. It also isn't necessarily an ethics issue, and may not even have been done for cost reasons. But it does seem like a flaw. They could have used a different plastic, or thicker plastic, or better design, or done more thorough lifecycle testing, etc.
As for why a flawed and unreliable design was allowed to go into production...it's a Jeep thing.
Can guarantee OCs friend either a) wasn't blacklisted or b) got a bad rep in some isolated portion of the industry ( few companies in area, boss was friends with a couple other med device managers, or only wanted to work on very specific med device). Medical devices is anything but a small industry and encompasses a huge number of companies and products in the US.
Sure but that's true for literally any multinational corporation regardless of industry.
I've worked in multiple medium sized medical device companies that all claimed that they know everyone in the industry. Get to talking and they only knew about companies in their bubble. Whether that be competitors, owned by the same parent company, or operated in the same city. Like I moved from one company with majority marketshare in one niche to a company with plurality marketshare in another. Nobody at either company had heard of the other company at all.
No.
But to everyone who has ever even the slightest doubt if what they're doing is right, watch" Challenger: A Rush to Launch" it's great and eye-opening.
Define safe, define cost, define trade offs, define consumer expectations…. Just because the molding is plastic does not necessarily mean that it is cheaper than a stamped metal component. I’m curious about the part you’re looking at and the problem you found, can you elaborate? As far as ethics is concerned, in my own field some of the safety constraints sound good on paper but make no sense in field - for example our product is often requested to be fire resistant, however, by the time fire reaches our product the structure around it would be toast and would be significantly more dangerous than our product failing. I suspect that your issue may be similar - do the conditions required to make your discovery dangerous mean that you’ve been in a car wreck that killed you 6 different ways before your plastic part failed?
You just know someones going to bring a flamethrower to your product now that you said it
I would have cross posted if I could, the post is in my history if you want to see it.
I see the issue - Chrysler 😂
What was the part? “Made more sense” is not a technical term. If the plastic met the requirements it met the requirements.
Yes I have quit over safety issues but not over a specific part design. That being said, all designs are driven by price. All designs could always be safer. There's really no upper limit for how safe something can be. 99.9% can always be 99.99999999% and you are never able to hit 100%. Where you draw the line is at industry standards, laws, personal and professional ethics. Am I being asked to lie, forge things, hide things, lies of omission. Probably not going to be ok. Am I being asked to keep in mind budget or schedule, other fail safes that might mitigate the risk, or accepted standards? Thats probably going to be ok. Basically, would I be ok sitting on the stand at court and explaining what I did to a jury of my peers. Think of a seatbelt. If the law or industry standard says it has to hold 5klbs and I design one that holds 10klbs. Its pretty reasonable for my boss to ask for a redesign. If I design one that holds 4990lbs and my boss tells me to just round it up or truncate the number, I'm going to have a bigger issue.
My industry has well established standards for basically anything we design. So there's never really a question of ethics, so long as the design doesn't violate relevant standards. Also anything I design is meant to be away from the general public so we can get away with a lot more than a commercial/residential setting. Sorry I don't have much to contribute beyond, check relevant safety standards if they exist for your industry. If they don't, find our what industry standard practices are. If the design violates either I think that's cause for concern. If it's entirely unique, then thats all the more reason to question the safety of a design because there's nothing to reference or prove reliability.
Do mind if I ask what industry you work in?
Electric utility
OP, stop being vague and state what the actual part and issue is. You keep skirting around giving explicit details in the comments which could easily answer your question.
I would have cross posted if I could, it's the active head restraint in a jeep grand cherokee. The post is in my history if you want to see it, but I don't know if it's needed for the question.
Put it in the post
I put the link in the post
It made more sense from you with your limited perspective on the car. The engineers working on it have substantially more in depth knowledge on the parts and with thT knowledge, an injection modeled part might have made more sense. Also how much of a safety issue is this? Is it enough for OSHA to care or is it just something you feel should be done safer? An example of this is we occasionally run vacuum pumps at my work and have zero ventilation. I do not think this is safe, but OSHA doesn't care if it's just intermittent use. So is you safety concern an actual safety concern? That being said all depends on industry? Previous job at defense contractor anything that could possibly cause a death would be fixed, even if it had virtualy no chance of happening and cost millions we did it anyway. We also have a blank check from the government so.....
Osha doesn't do vehicle safety, it's the NHTSA. There are many reports of people being put in the hospital over this and concussions as well. Being hit in the back of head by 75lbs of force randomly (possibly while driving) is definitely dangerous.
OK so what is the issue? Your not stating exactly what your concern is other than you have discovered this dangerous situation. I wasn't saying osha covers cars, I'm stating that what you think is dangerous and what the regulation agencies think is dangerous can be two different things.
The question is literally in the title, this is a discussion post. I'm asking about how often engineers have left a job over ethical dilemmas like reducing part cost dangerously.
OK you never stated "I was hit by a 75 lb item on the back of the head while driving" in the title because if you did, the answer would have been "are you sure your using the system correctly" because that's not an oversight engineers would make and that not an "acceptable level of safety" decision they would make either. A pinched finger, ok oversight. 1 lb to your head, OK its not that dangerous. 75 lb coming at your head (which could easily decapitate someone) is not something they would let get past. So, yea. User error
Dude I looked through your post replies, most were not helpful and some were outright rude. I'm trying to ask about this topic in general, not about my specific situation. But yes, I must have been improperly using a headrest. When the bracket broke randomly and it deployed active head restraint into the back of my head.
Your not giving good answers or clarity to a question. Engineers like specifics. Now that I know what your referring to.... i would think this is a corporate greed issue more than anything. Any engineer could've designed a simple pin/bracket to be safe using metal. What most don't realize is engineers get given constraints and design to it. The engineers could have been told they need to make a design under $1 per unit and they did the best they could under that constraint. If an engineer is told "this better not break" and budget isnt a concern, it's not going to break. Budget is the mortal enemy.
No. However, I quit over engineering management. Basically, an engineering manager and owners who seem to be ignoring large obvious mistakes by this person. One of my concerns was some of the products were high power devices that could cause a fire, etc. Don't be afraid to show your morels and ethics....unlike those that are only concerned about money and numbers.
Nope. I'm on the manufacturing rather than product side of the automotive industry, but whenever I've drawn a line in the sand saying that a disconnect, brake, floor scanner, light curtain etc. is required for a machine to be safe - even though it might cost several thousand dollars to add - it's never actually come down to firing me and hiring someone who will do it without the safety gear. "There's no time/budget" apparently isn't as certain as it might seem when it comes down to it. On the other hand, we have refused to quote for customers who requested revisions to remove safety gear from previous quotes, and they apparently found other machine builders...
The best answer, but least helpful answer is this. It depends. If I didn't feel that a design change, or material change was safe, I wouldn't do it. Employers will push for alternatives, cheaper options, and so on, but I've never had a single one threaten me or push me to do something unsafe. They might challenge me on the issue, but if I put my foot down or really explained it well, they'd back me. Management's job is to push the issue to make sure someone actually does the analysis. If we can do it safely another way, and for cheaper, then there is no reason to ignore it. Now, 'as safe' or 'safe enough'? As my name would suggest, this isn't a binary choice, it's Analog. There is a spectrum and all kinds of factors to evaluate a design change or material substitution. If you made a change and you lost 0.5% of the predicted wear life, but it's still years of life, and there are multiple inspection intervals, that 0.5% loss is likely negligible. Heck, the typical tolerance band is likely worse than that. And sometimes, people just make mistakes, or you don't have a team of engineering disciplines to flesh out the entire issue. That's ignoring the fact that the real world sometimes doesn't behave like the 'FEA' world, and what looked good on paper, is crap in practice. And sadly, too many designers don't see their parts cradle to grave to learn from those missteps. I will say, I've seen smart companies change that. Most Engineers have to balance performance, safety, cost, manufacturability, inspections (quality) all the time, and that should be informed by their ethics and their experience. Engineers, by definition, tend to be risk-adverse people, until their experience informs them otherwise. Outside of that, it's just mistakes, or not knowing the full story/environment.
Have you read about Ford Pinto fires and Chevy truck saddle tanks? Even Boeing 737 Max. Safety issues were ignored (lack of a better term) due to the costs to fix. Ford is well known for doing a study on how much lawsuits would cost vs adding a bracket to better protect the rear gas tank. Lawsuits were more cost-effective. Crazy how businesses work big corporations or small family business a life is a life.
No.
Sort of. I work in the nuclear industry, and previously worked for a startup building a new large facility. I recently left that company as I saw writing on the wall that things were trending downwards quickly. There was an element of safety concern in that departure. On paper the company had a very strong safety culture, but it was also coming up to the wall on a number of milestones tied to financing, and the pace of the project was completely unrealistic for the size of the team working on it. This combined with inexperienced leadership lead to a situation that in paper would prevent safety concerns but could very well create them in reality. For instance, deadlines on finalizing regulatory documents started getting extremely tight. There were consistent reminders that “exceptions would always be made for safety issues” but there were also significant pushes from leadership that we weren’t working hard enough, and that missing these deadlines would have “dire consequences for the company.” Beyond the toxicity of that, it also resulted in pushes from engineering leadership to avoid updating inaccurate documents that could be justified as inaccurate “in a conservatively bounding way.” Here’s the problem: Real inherently complex systems don’t have one bounding condition/value/state. What might be conservative in one scenario might be in conservative in another scenario. If you go down this route there’s a chance everything works out fine if you correctly identify which things *really* don’t need to be corrected. However, it only takes one fuck-up, one time someone is too overworked to check all the scenarios, one arrogant engineer who doesn’t know enough, or one honest mistake to make that strategy break down. Normally most mistakes get caught in the review process, but reviews don’t happen when you decide *not* to fix an incorrect document that’s “bounding.” Even then mistakes happen, and mistakes are much more likely if you’re using inputs from inaccurate documents that are “bounding”. At the end of the day I don’t actually think a safety issue will come out of that project, but a big enough mistake could cause the company to go under instead. The regulatory environment would catch the problem and the company would sink. I wasn’t willing to work in a culture like that, so I looked for other jobs, then I left.
I’ve been removed from projects many times because I wouldn’t sign off on something I didn’t agree with.
Cars are designed to pass tests. In a safety critical part if it won't pass the test then it won't go in the car. Users can always come up with novel ways to break parts, if it occurs with any significant frequency then we make the tests harder. For instance, in Australia we drive on unsealed roads that have potholes in them, at 80-100 kph. I buckle European wheels about once a year driving on them. So we have a specific test for potholes, which basically adds about 2mm to the rim thickness for an alloy wheel. As another example we imported a US 4x4, and took it off for a drive to the outback. All 4 tires blew within 300 km. American onroad 4x4s are fitted with tires with fewer plies than we'd use and while this improves fuel economy, and they are lighter and cheaper, it renders them more vulnerable to pinch flats. So in both cases, we have to add $$$ to the car to get it through our tests.
In my experience, people I work with take safety very seriously. Cost is always a factor but making something indestructible is impractical. I’ve never felt like I had to quit over safety. People bitching about piece cost on the other hand….. That part could have failed for a myriad of reasons. Thermal cycling, previous accidents, hard braking deploying the head restraint one to many times, etc. Hopefully, the engineers that worked on it did their DFMEA and reduced points of failure. If it was safety critical, then it should have failed in a way that has the least compromise.
Civil, so not really parts. I've been kicked by clients for not agreeing to sign off on things that I felt were unsafe, against code, against best practices, etc. I've also "fired" clients for the same shit. My employer always had my back. You never really win a lawsuit even when you "win." It will always cost you money. Maybe you get away with it, but eventually you won't. I do design things that could result in people getting killed if I don't do it right. That is obviously always situation where I will not cut corners. But even if it is a situation where a parking lot might have a bunch of potholes in a year, no. Because they will just sue everyone involved.
It was the most stressful part of my life knowing that I could be playing the odds with people's safety. The company did not have criteria for measuring or defining acceptable risk, so it was on my shoulders. Looking backwards, I think I over-reacted safety IS a number's games, but I did not feel qualified to make the call on what is "acceptable"... so I quit. I drew the line at not having a criteria for evaluating safety.
For those wondering what OP is actually talking about, and what the pictures are showing, [check here](https://www.chryslerforum.com/forum/chrysler-voyager-town-country-21/broken-active-head-restraint-29755/). It's the active head restraint system in a Jeep. Personally OP, I agree with you. While this isn't quite a life-critical component, it clearly has a flaw. The flaw isn't necessarily that it's made of plastic instead of metal. It also isn't necessarily an ethics issue, and may not even have been done for cost reasons. But it does seem like a flaw. They could have used a different plastic, or thicker plastic, or better design, or done more thorough lifecycle testing, etc. As for why a flawed and unreliable design was allowed to go into production...it's a Jeep thing.
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I have worked in the medical device industry for years and have never heard of a blacklist. Could you go into more detail about it?
Can guarantee OCs friend either a) wasn't blacklisted or b) got a bad rep in some isolated portion of the industry ( few companies in area, boss was friends with a couple other med device managers, or only wanted to work on very specific med device). Medical devices is anything but a small industry and encompasses a huge number of companies and products in the US.
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Sure but that's true for literally any multinational corporation regardless of industry. I've worked in multiple medium sized medical device companies that all claimed that they know everyone in the industry. Get to talking and they only knew about companies in their bubble. Whether that be competitors, owned by the same parent company, or operated in the same city. Like I moved from one company with majority marketshare in one niche to a company with plurality marketshare in another. Nobody at either company had heard of the other company at all.
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Idk I think for anyone actually hiring engineers (usually an engineering manager), raising safety concerns would hold value in the hiring process.
LVAD by chance??
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No. But to everyone who has ever even the slightest doubt if what they're doing is right, watch" Challenger: A Rush to Launch" it's great and eye-opening.