However, the role we claim to take on, true "selflessness" is near impossible to reach in practice. Before we are engineers we are people and have basic needs. Without whipping out my Googlefu I would wager there are certainly more cases of people blowing the whistle and seeing their way of life crumble around them than there are who get protected by law. There is massive resistance to change from those who call the shots and if you're to go against the grain you're looking to sacrifice your career, life, health, etc.. The engineer says "you need to say something or people will die" but the person says "your family needs to eat".
I blew whistles twice in about a 6-month period. First was at a good company (won't name it, you know what it is) when I had a really bad manager. (I worked with a recruiter once who knew the name and said, "I get his people all the time, he's the worst manager at <company>.") Four months later I worked at a startup where top management tried to get me to commit felony perjury. Refusing to it so cost me my job, and the CEO launched a months-long personal campaign to ruin my reputation. If he weren't basically considered a joke by everyone who actually knows him, and if I weren't above-average in terms of being articulate, I'd have been fucked.
If I were of more moderate talents (meaning IQ 130-140, so I'm talking about a level that's still quite strong) or older (meaning 45) or had kids, I would have been in a lot more danger. The percentage of people who can blow whistles and survive it is small-- maybe 1 or 2 percent. There are a lot of shady databases that some companies are now doing to make it easier to share information in appropriate ways. It started with banks and tech companies to share compensation information (because in finance, your bonus is your performance review, so people inflated their numbers) but it's also been used for blacklisting attempts.
What really surprised me out of the whistleblowing experience was not the official response. That generally came out to what I expected. But you learn quickly that most people are morally weak and will turn on you, either because they don't like your "tone" or because "you should have used proper channels". What those people don't see is that whistleblowing almost always happens when "proper channels" fail. (See: the infamous, but misunderstood "hot coffee lawsuit", wherein the plaintiff originally just asked not for a million-dollar award-- which she never received, by the way-- but to have her medical bills paid-- a reasonable request given all the circumstances.) Most people are morally vacant "slutty cheerleaders" (please see this high-school metaphor as gender neutral; sluts and cheerleaders can both be male) who ultimately side with power unless power really fucks up.
What's the best thing society can do for whistleblowers? Personally, I think blacklisting should be a jail offense with the same penalty as attempted murder, because that's what it is.
No, not at all. Blacklisting is attempted murder (perhaps with a low success rate) or, at the least, reckless endangerment.
Financial hardship leads to depression and risk of suicide. Obviously, people can't be held liable for all cases in which they create conditions that may be unhealthy, but the purpose of blacklisting is to create persistent financial hardship, often without the person knowing the true cause.
The fact that a blacklisted person will often not know the cause of his failed future interviews may add to the sense of low self-worth, or the suspicion may create paranoia, and both are conducive to mental health events that place the sufferer in high danger and others around in medium danger.
Of course, there are legitimate actions that may cause financial hardship. If you fire someone but don't damage his reputation, then you've made a valid business decision and the fault isn't with you. That's just how business works. If you ruin his reputation or make it harder for him to find jobs and he ends up sick or dead, that's your fault entirely and you should be brought up on criminal charges.
By that logic, exposing a scam is also murder, since the scammer could go bankrupt, face jail, etc.
Not all things that cause financial hardship are attempted murder. Firing someone is even more likely to cause hardship, but a valid business decision. Financial hardship isn't the purpose, though, when you fire someone or expose a scam. It's a side effect. What you are really trying to do, in the scam case, is protect the public and, in the firing case, end an unprofitable business relationship. Once those goals are achieved, you generally don't go after that person to cause further financial difficulty.
Reporting a drunk driver is murder, since they may get arrested, lose their job, and be shunned.
Again, no. If anything, you're saving the world from more severe hardships (of the financial kind; but, more severely, injuries and deaths) by reporting him. Besides, when you report him, your goal isn't to ruin his life. It's to protect innocents from the danger he's causing. (If his life gets ruined, he's not exactly innocent, but that's probably not your goal in reporting him.)
See, blacklisting is done specifically to cause persistent and unreasonable financial hardship. Financial difficulties to another party are, in those other cases, side effects. With blacklisting, there is intent to ruin the person's life, and that intent is persistent, which generally means that there is no escape for that person. Different story altogether.
I blew whistles twice in about a 6-month period. First was at a good company (won't name it, you know what it is) when I had a really bad manager. (I worked with a recruiter once who knew the name and said, "I get his people all the time, he's the worst manager at <company>.") Four months later I worked at a startup where top management tried to get me to commit felony perjury. Refusing to it so cost me my job, and the CEO launched a months-long personal campaign to ruin my reputation. If he weren't basically considered a joke by everyone who actually knows him, and if I weren't above-average in terms of being articulate, I'd have been fucked.
If I were of more moderate talents (meaning IQ 130-140, so I'm talking about a level that's still quite strong) or older (meaning 45) or had kids, I would have been in a lot more danger. The percentage of people who can blow whistles and survive it is small-- maybe 1 or 2 percent. There are a lot of shady databases that some companies are now doing to make it easier to share information in appropriate ways. It started with banks and tech companies to share compensation information (because in finance, your bonus is your performance review, so people inflated their numbers) but it's also been used for blacklisting attempts.
What really surprised me out of the whistleblowing experience was not the official response. That generally came out to what I expected. But you learn quickly that most people are morally weak and will turn on you, either because they don't like your "tone" or because "you should have used proper channels". What those people don't see is that whistleblowing almost always happens when "proper channels" fail. (See: the infamous, but misunderstood "hot coffee lawsuit", wherein the plaintiff originally just asked not for a million-dollar award-- which she never received, by the way-- but to have her medical bills paid-- a reasonable request given all the circumstances.) Most people are morally vacant "slutty cheerleaders" (please see this high-school metaphor as gender neutral; sluts and cheerleaders can both be male) who ultimately side with power unless power really fucks up.
What's the best thing society can do for whistleblowers? Personally, I think blacklisting should be a jail offense with the same penalty as attempted murder, because that's what it is.