[rossdavidh]

I think this article makes too much of the fact that they were not engineers (I say this as a person with two engineering degrees), and too little of the fact that this was by far not the first indication of problems. I can't find the HN link now, but the official government report was pretty damning. There were numerous incidents that lead to injuries, numerous reports that rafts had gone airborne when they shouldn't have, numerous times when employees expressed reservations or misgivings about this ride. It doesn't take an engineering degree, or any degree, to respond to what you see happening. This accident didn't come out of nowhere, and they had many previous indications that there was a problem.

[steamer25]

Yeah I could imagine an article coming from the opposite direction, deriding ivory tower calculations in favor of real world experimentalism in some case where the developers didn't do enough physical testing. There are definitely plenty of cases where design mistakes have been unaddressed to tragic consequences: poor modeling in the Hyatt Regency collapse (https://youtu.be/VnvGwFegbC8), underspecified gusset plates causing the Minneapolis bridge collapse and possibly the novel methods chosen for the recently collapsed Florida pedestrian bridge, etc. Ultimately, the methodology is probably less important than whether the business chose to recklessly defraud people about the risks and safety concerns or acted in good faith.

[Gibbon1]

I believe one of the reason we have professional engineering licenses which require years of working under a PE is because an engineering degree is simply not enough to weed out the loons and incompetents.

I worked for 10 years for a industrial controls company and I have a wildly more conservative attitude towards safety than most of the engineers, especially CS people I know. Far as I can tell this doesn't correlate to a having an accredited degree at all.