[josephg]

Thanks for those numbers!

Imagine yourself as an aeronautical engineer around that time. You have a sense of what good safety practices could look like - you’ve been to conferences and talked to your colleagues, and you have some thoughts yourself. But management at your airline doesn’t want to spend the money.

Would you argue for meekly going along with management’s choices, knowing those choices will kill people? I would say, if you did, you would have blood on your hands. We’re people first and employees second.

The stakes are lower and there’s a middle ground here. But you have a voice, and usually more power than you think. The siren song of dumping all responsibility for your actions onto upper management makes you into a victim and a child. It’s bad for society, usually bad for your company in the long term and bad for your psychological health and development. And a disaster for your professional development.

I don’t know if that lands with you, but it’s certainly a lesson I wish I could give to myself over a decade ago.