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[–] YallJusRaycis 1 point 44 points (+45|-1) ago  (edited ago)

Total bullshit. Engineers build what they're told to build and it's the executives' responsibility to approve what goes out the door. Shitty illegal software on millions of cars doesn't mean that engineers knew they were breaking the law. It's totally possible to silo engineers so that they don't know what they're working on. If they had known a lot of them would probably have left. I had a boss with a high security clearance who worked on systems that stored nuclear bomb test data and had no idea what he was working on until he pieced it together from circumstantial clues.

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[–] FlintRockBone 0 points 9 points (+9|-0) ago 

I think this is the most likely answer, on a large enough team you can appropriately silo your engineers and then have a small team integrate the code in such a way that it would have violated the professional ethics of the engineers that wrote the underlying code. It's always hard to tell exactly what happened, maybe they had such a shitty development workflow that a single engineer could pull it off. I don't think that's likely though.