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points by bumby 2 days ago | 0 comments
Get rid of the industrial exemption and the responsibility falls to get licensed engineer who approves the design.

Most people don’t realize that many industries work within the framework of licensure, but also have industrial exemptions. There has also been a movement to peel back some of those exemptions because of the problems you point to.

[–] augment_me 2 days ago
Okay, my industrial engineer who approved this is part of a 3-man company in India.

We already do this. My prior uni got hacked, everyone's IDs/drivers licenses/passports, mails, data got leaked. The vendor was a 4-person third party cloud provider who had all of the necessary security certifications for the uni to avoid gross negligence. No-one paid anything as the 4-man firm went bankrupt and the uni got a new provider who is fully licensed to avoid gross negligence.

With software, you can stack these shells of proxies almost for free.

Even given this, the industrial exemption is not getting rid of currently with status quo. So the worldview is not really valid until it is.

[–] bumby 2 days ago
I’m not sure I follow. An industrial engineer is not the same as an industrial engineering exemption. I can’t absolve myself from the bridge design because I hired a designer in a different country; to use that design here, it must be approved by an engineer with jurisdiction. That’s who holds the responsibility.

Which licensed engineer stamped the software? The answer is probably “none”, because licensed engineers are liable even if their company is bankrupt. The person holds the license, not the company so it sounds like we’re talking past one another.

[–] augment_me 2 days ago
Sorry I mistyped, it meant to be responsible engineer given the industrial exemption.

I worked in HW before for home electronics that had to be certified. There was no responsibility for the engineers, the cert house had to take on this responsibility, and they had a shell certification company hired who would conduct the tests and take on the responsibility. At one point there was a litigation due to an RF leakage from a LATAM-bound device causing signaling issues to public infra and causing an accident, but it went nowhere because of the layering of responsibility made by the cert houses. No engineer was responsible.

[–] bumby 1 day ago
That type of HW certification is different than what I’m talking about. Yes, there are certain quality standards and certifications for something like J-STD, but importantly the domains that use them, like aerospace, still fall under industrial exemptions when it comes to a licensed engineer taking responsibility. Again, the license is attached to a real life person, not a trail of shell companies. If a bridge fails, you can literally look at the license number stamped on the design drawings to find out who is responsible.