Engineering professionalism and ethics - 2013
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Resources and slides
- The PEO's website has a copy of The Code of Ethics.
03 December 2013 (14B)
We will cover an introduction to the PEO, using this handout (available in class for you).
There were many questions about the PEO and licensing. They are most likely answered on their website.
04 December 2013 (14C)
The Ontario Code of Ethics for engineers, though this Code certainly applies, whether you work in Ontario or not. All other jurisdictions have a similar Code.
Consider these situations (they are based on situations I have experienced, witnessed, or are actual cases):
- Your boss asked you to use a thinner pressure vessel wall, to reduce cost, but you know that this will push you to a lower safe operating pressure, and it is likely that for short times you will operate at higher pressures.
- You realize your colleague, and your friend, has a drug problem, that will almost certainly influence his abilities at work. Your work is related to planning production schedules across 25 different sites in North America. Is your answer any different if your job were designing, installing and servicing SIS units for packed-bed reactors? Do you report this matter to your company and harm his career? What about human-rights issues, where your friend's health concerns should remain private? If you remain silent, and something bad happens on the job, will you be held partially responsible if you keep silent?
- You continually make improvements to a major process at your employer. Last week you discovered an interesting and unique way of improving reactor efficiency, but your employer has not given you raises and recognition for several years - here is a chance to start your own company and sell the technology back to them, and other similar companies.
- In your SDL project you discover a group member has plagiarized a section describing how the water-gas shift reactor works.
- You realize 5 months later that the supplier under charged for the heat exchanger; they forgot to add installation costs, and some extra piping that they delivered. Your project is already over-budget by 15%. You approved their invoice to be paid two months ago and didn't notice the omission at that time (is your answer any different if you have not paid yet?)
- You are requested by higher level management to downplay the level of pollutant discharged; if you report pollutants accurately, you risk having the plant shut down, losing your job, and your colleagues' jobs will certainly be cut as well. You have student loans to pay off, a house and a car payments.
- You work for company C; company A has developed a new rubber process in the lab for snow tires, they have contract with you, company C, to perfect the process and scale it up to high volumes. You work with one of your other clients, company B, and realize this rubber will work well for athletic tracks and field. You tell an engineer in company B about the work you are doing with A; after all, snow tires and athletic fields are as unrelated as possible.
- You graduate and look for jobs for many weeks. You land an interview and receive a job from company A. Two weeks later you receive positive news from company B that you had interviewed with earlier, but they didn't get back to you quickly. Company A has already started training you. Company B is your dream job, or pretty close to it. Does it matter what the salary of company B is vs A (say within a $20,000 range)?
- The safety system at Bhopal, in India, was known to be incapable of dealing with the quantity of methyl isocyanate in the storage tank. Some of the safety systems were turned off to save money.
- It's December 2004 and you are an engineer at BP, at the Texas City refinery. You review the safety systems and realize (a) the level of redundancy required between the BPCS and SIS layers are not present and (b) maintenance on the sensors have not been performed, even though the forms claim they have. What courses of action might you take? [How different is your answer, in the context of what happened on March 2005?]
This class is not a guide to what you should do in these cases, but about how the code of ethics can highlight the problem (every case will have additional complexity). We can then brainstorm several alternative courses of action.
Some ethics cases to practice on for the exam
In each case you should be able to
- a) identify the ethical issues, using the numbering from the Code of Ethics
- b) brainstorm alternative courses of action. There is almost always some other alternative.
You do not need to go into the analytical details, as shown in the examples below.
Cases