Engineers and the Importance of Ethics in Their Professional Lives

A father brought his son into his retail business. He said, "First I will give you a lesson in ethics. Suppose a customer gives me a 5-dollar bill and I give him change. After he leaves, I discover that it is a 10-dollar bill. We now have a problem in ethics: Should I or should I not tell my partner?"

Morals

It is not the purpose of this article to exhort you to be either honest or dishonest; that is a matter between you and your conscience. This article's subject is success, and there have been many successful and unsuccessful crooks, and there have been many successful and unsuccessful honest people.



Twenty-One Ethical Problems You Will Have

It is this article's purpose to present you with a series of ethical problems which may arise in your life so that you will have thought of them before they arise and will not have to make snap judgments when you face them. This article has no absolute answers for you to these problems, but it will help you to face them before they arise.

1. We all fill out time cards so that the cost of our time will be charged to the proper accounts. Sometimes we or our managers are embarrassed because a job is taking longer than expected and are tempted to charge time to a different job or account to mask the overrun. This is not stealing, after all, because no money changes hands; it just misleads the accountants, who deserve no better anyway. Two ethical questions: Should you do this on your own? What should you do if you manager asks you to do it or if you learn that your manager is changing your time card? Sometimes money might change hands. Is it ethical to ask for a raise, or should you wait for your employer's scheduled review? Is your request a form of blackmail, an implied threat that you will leave if a raise does not come through?
   
   
2. Is it ethical to take, for your own use, pencils, paper, and other items of very small cost because of the time it would take to go out and buy them at retail? If it is quixotic to make an issue of one paper clip, where do you draw the line?
   
   
3. To extend this problem, is it ethical or at least acceptable to take objects of large value if you judge that you can get away with taking them? How about synthetic transactions (i.e., fraud)?
   
   
4. Is it ethical to accept a cheap lunch from a salesperson whose visit extends through the noon hour? How about an expensive lunch? Drinks after work? An expensive dinner? Tickets to a ball game? A weekend on the boss's yacht? (Don't laugh-your pronounced judgment of the product may influence very large sums of money.) The gift of a souvenir ballpoint pen with a company name and worth less than a dollar? Gifts valued at $1, $10, $10,000? All the above have figured in real transactions.
   
   
5. What about using ideas generated by someone else, either inside or outside your organization, without payment of money, credit, or opportunity? When is such an idea to be considered "intellectual property," and when is it to be considered "in the public domain"? What ground rules apply to intellectual property which you judge to be safe to take without legal consequences?
   
   
6. A salesperson discloses a company's unpublished product ideas in the hope of selling to your company, and you see an opportunity to in-corporate them into your product.
   
   
7. Is it ethical to invite in a vendor's salesperson just to learn something when you know ahead of time that you will definitely not buy from that vendor? International Business Machines (IBM) forbids the practice. It teaches and actually enforces a strict code of ethics on all its employees who deal with outsiders.
   
   
8. How honest should you be with vendors when you are encouraging them to spend effort in trying to sell to you?
   
   
9. When a patent expires, it is absolutely legal to copy the product in detail and sell it. How do you feel about participating in such a process?
   
   
10. How do you feel about circumventing the security system in your own organization, not to steal secrets or property but either to see if you can do it as a challenge or for your own convenience?
    
    
11. How do you feel about circumventing the procedural rules of your organization in order to make faster progress with your work?
    
    
12. Is it proper to moonlight for another company (presumably not competitive with yours)? Is fatigue a consideration?
    
    
13. Should you blow the whistle on a person or an organization, including your own, when you become aware of serious wrongdoing? Should such whistle-blowing be equated with informing and talebearing? In some government contractors' plants the Department of Defense (DOD) requires a hot line for reporting security, fraud, waste, and abuse violations.
    
    
14. You will be called upon to give personal referrals about people you know and may have worked with. When your opinion includes an unfavorable portion, do you say it like it is, do you distort or lie, do you evade the unfavorable portions (which is a silent lie), or do you refuse to give referrals? Many personnel departments will say nothing except to confirm employment dates. What is your ethical responsibility to the inquirer and to the person inquired about? Suppose the inquiry is from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as part of a security check? Suppose it is from the police as part of a criminal investigation?
    
    
15. Bootlegging, i.e., working on a project which has not been authorized by your managers and charging the work to an account for which you are not working, is a wonderful subject for engineers. The practice goes on in many sizes and types.

You can bootleg a project for your organization when you have been denied authorization and you feel that it is important that the project be done or when you want to get it started before the authorization paperwork has been completed. You can bootleg a project for an outsider either for a worthy cause or to sell your time and the organization's resources and pocket the money.

You can bootleg a project for yourself. This can be anything from making a personal phone call on company time to using a company drill press to drill a hole in a part you own, to building a large personal project with your own company time, assistants' company time, and company materials and equipment.

You can bootleg a small amount of company time to think out, discuss, and write a proposal to the company that it undertake a project or change a practice. In some organizations there is an authorized account to charge for such time, in which case it is not bootlegging.

The magnitude of a bootleg project can vary from a few minutes of your time (that personal phone call) to the development of the Sidewinder missile (which was bootlegged by a brilliant Navy laboratory director). Clearly, to do zero bootlegging is quixotic, so your ethical question is where do you draw the line? (There is also the question of how brave you are, a question for both good guys and bad guys.)