If you look up job postings on LinkedIn, particularly ones that are clearly AI generated descriptions, you’ll notice a lot of startups talking about how the role is “looking for someone to own ____ end-to-end” or that the role gives “full ownership of _____ pipeline and design”. When I first saw these descriptors, I simply just read *responsibility* in place of ownership. There are some subtle differences, sure.
Personally, I never really saw the difference between the two; responsibility is heavy. Maybe it’s because I was too big of a fan of Spider man as a kid.
The idea of responsibility as an engineer for me began with two stories I was told long before I even began college.
Made of Iron
There is a ceremony in Canada called the “Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer” where graduating engineers are given an iron ring, and their acceptance of the ring is meant to not only create a sense of pride in their craft, but also serve as a reminder of the responsibility towards the people that are effected by what they create.
The origin of the ring is based on the Quebec Bridge which is known to have collapsed during construction, killing dozens. The story is that iron from the bridge was fashioned into rings and given to the engineers who designed the bridge, to serve as a brutal reminder of what they were responsible for. This same iron was also fashioned into rings for the early versions of this ceremony. To this day, the ceremony is still done and is no longer locked into just being Canadian; if you attend an American university, there are good odds of receiving this kind of iron ring or being eligible to purchase one at graduation, particularly if you major in something like Structural or Civil engineering.
A quick aside: it is unclear if the material used to create the rings ever actually came from the bridge and the mystery is part of the allure of the story.
The O-Ring
The story of the Challenger is one of the most well-known engineering disasters in modern history.
The critical failure were rubber O-rings that were used in the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters to ensure a proper seal on a specific joint. The night before launch, the O-rings lost the required flexibility due to the cold weather. This loss of flexibility meant the O-ring couldn’t do its job and wouldn’t seal the joint properly. There were multiple engineers who recommended delaying the launch that night, but the managers of the project pushed back and ultimately the managers in charge of manufacturing the O-rings themselves reversed the no-go recommendation, approving the launch.
Seven people died only seventy-three seconds after launch.
Engineers and Discipline
The standard discussion surrounding these stories is about how important it is to listen to engineers who flag safety concerns and how organizations need to be structured to enable these concerns to block tragedies. In engineering classes, it becomes a discussion on the importance of voicing your opinions and emphasizing the impact that your decisions can have as an engineer.
I believe neither fully capture the importance of the human element in both stories. In both stories, there are constraints placed on the people involved; there is money to be lost and deadlines to be kept. There is pressure on people’s jobs and productivity to be achieved. In the case of the O-rings, NASA hadn’t had a catastrophe of this magnitude and the launch schedule for this flight had been delayed multiple times already. More, and more pressure.
I think it is very easy for me to sit in my chair and say I would have done better. The same can be said modern day versions of such engineering follies. Cambridge Analytica, the crashes of the Boeing 737, Facebook and Myanmar, etc.
In modern times, the inability to take adequate responsibility and ownership no longer spins tales of organizational complexity. Instead, the discussion revolves around personal greed and self-interest. In a lot of ways, responsibility has evolved. It is no longer an endeavor about doing what is right over what is dangerous. It is now an endeavor of doing what’s right despite standing to profit tremendously from doing what’s wrong.
Needless to say, modern discourse regards LLM models, AI companies, and the process of creating these models. And once more, it is unclear if the responsible shall prevail.