Lars Gustafson, Ollie Peng, Darrel Weng, Alexandre Chong

We wanted to create a project that would be able to spread the word regarding a topic that we believe should be more heavily acknowledged in the engineering community – conflicts of interest.

The motivation we have for pushing the education of conflicts of interest in the engineering community is based off of multiple interviews of engineers who come from a wide array of disciplines. In each one of these interviews, their personal struggles with conflicts of interest in the workplace came up. If this was not enough to pique our interest, each situation they faced regarding conflict of interest was especially difficult for them to deal with and they felt as if they did not have the necessary resources or education to handle the conflict to the best of their ability. Although each situation had different manifestations, they all pointed back to the fact that education and resources regarding conflict of interest are extremely critical and that they need to be implemented in work environments as soon as possible.

Our goal, then, would be to increase the level of awareness among our fellow engineering (student) peers  before they enter the work environment. Just like having the technical knowledge and skill is important to finding a job, we believe that having an ethical and conscious awareness regarding conflict of interests, especially when start ups are now so prevalent in the industry, should be equally as important when it comes to preparing for a job. To realize this in an effective and efficient manner, we plan on producing an online survey geared towards exposing common and uncommon situations caused by an underlying conflict of interest. The survey will consist of a series of questions in the form of a hypothetical situation that revolves around a particular conflict of interest, and some questions that will try to get the survey-taker to think critically on the issue. After the hypothetical and questions, a separate page of the survey will (briefly) detail what conflict of interest the hypothetical revolved around, (good) ways the person in the situation could have handled it, and possible resources the person could have turned to in his/her company for help and support. To measure the effectiveness of this approach, we would include at the very end of the survey a question that asks the survey-takers  to rate the level of awareness of the issue of conflicts of interest in the industry that they have now, as well as how important they believe awareness of this issue is (as compared to before they took the survey). In order to keep this method efficient, we would like to keep our survey as short as possible, as we realize that our fellow engineering peers do not have much free time, especially with final projects and midterms coming up.

Our hands on situational guide would look something similar to:

1. John, representing his company, is closing a deal on a sale for a food sterilization machine to a major company, Nestle. He decides to run some last minute test on the machine to ensure it’s functionality, but discovers that out of 25 total test runs, 1 test run failed completely. In response, John declares the machine unsafe for use and uses extra company expenses to ensure that the machine satisfactorily operable before finalizing the sale.

Q1: Was John’s decision to ensure the fidelity of the machine’s operations the right choice? Y/N

Q2: Given the following choices, which do you think would have been the best choice for John to follow through with: a) The 1 fail is an outlier; just go through with the sale. b) John’s choice in this case was the right way to go.

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John can be seen here as facing a conflict of interest: he could have closed the deal, disregarding the 1 failed test run, thereby quickly finishing the sale, versus his actual choice of delaying the sale and ensuring that the machine operated as intended. He knew that the machine’s failures could potentially impact a large group of people, as Nestle products are very popular. Had John not known what to do, he could have contacted his manager, or his company’s HR department for ethical advice on how to proceed.

2. Larry, a high level manager in an engineering corporation decides to hire a family friend by the name of George. Over the course of a few months, Larry sees that George is performing extremely subpar. Larry decides to have a talk with George reminding him of his responsibilities and the standard that he has to follow. However, a few more months pass by and Larry has to make a decision regarding whether or not to let George go from the company since George has not improved his work performance at all. Eventually, Larry decides that it is in the best interests of the company to fire George.

Q1: Was Larry’s decision to fire George the right decision? Y/N

Q2: If these were Larry’s possible options and you had the chance to decide which one to choose, which would it be? (a) Fire George from the company (b) Remind George once again to improve his performance and give George more grace since they are family friends

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In this situation, Larry is clearly facing a conflict of interest. He was conflicted whether or not to fire George since he wasn’t performing to the standard the company required of him or whether to let George keep working for the company since he and George were friends and he did not want to ruin their personal relationship. In situations like these, Larry had many resources such as the HR department as well as his executive managers to come towards and ask for advice.

3. Tom works in research and development for Intel, designing new designs for ever faster and more efficient computer chips.  One day, a newly hired employee gives Tom’s research and development team a package containing photographs of each layer of AMD’s latest computer chip.  Whereas Tom’s team could originally only reverse-engineer and analyze AMD’s chip if they wanted a look into the competition’s designs, they now have the option to use the photographs instead, which would allow them to instantly and accurately model the layout of the entire AMD computer chip.  With only two months before Intel announces its newest CPU design, Tom must decide how the research team will spend their remaining time.  Will he take advantage of the photographs, giving the team valuable knowledge about AMD’s designs and more time to develop a faster and better CPU before the deadline?  Will he ignore the photographs but still reverse-engineer the AMD CPU chip, knowing that the team will have less time to actually create their own chip and that the reverse-engineering results would practically be the same as what’s on the photographs anyways?  Or does he ignore AMD’s chip completely and simply tell his team to spend the next two months iterating and improving upon Intel’s existing designs?

Question 1: Imagine you were in Tom’s shoes and needed to decide how your research team will spend the next two months.  Which of the three choices is the most ethically correct?

Question 2: Which of the three options do you think the majority of research and development teams actually choose in real life?

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           This situation that Tom faces is an example of the conflict of interest that many employees face between themselves, their companies, and the entire industry.  In this particular case, if Tom chose to take advantage of the photographs, he and his team would be more likely to create a much speedier chip than the competition, and thus he and Intel would reap significant financial rewards.  However, this course of action severely damages the industry as a whole by compromising its competitive integrity; if such practices were widespread, than the innovations of smaller companies would instantly be absorbed and produced more cheaply by larger companies, ultimately running the smaller companies out of business.

           Likewise, reverse-engineering a competitor’s chip also dampens innovation in the industry, but to a much less extent than using photographs.  Moreover, keeping tabs on the competition can arguably be a smart business move that prevents one company from overtaking all the others; in a way, this levels the playing field.  Nonetheless, the most ethically correct choice is to only focus on your company’s own designs and disregard your competitors’ designs.

           Unfortunately, such a noble approach is rarely seen in the real world because it puts your company at a severe disadvantage to those competitors who are looking at other companies’ designs; thus, the majority of companies actually do reverse-engineer each others’ chips.  Companies don’t take photographs, however, because not only is it bad for the industry in the long term, it also is kinda-sorta illegal: while companies cannot copyright or patent circuit designs because they are geometrical ideas, almost akin to art, they can apply for GNU General Public Licenses, which are issued by national governments and act like hard-to-enforce copyrights.

4. Edmond is a safety officer for the Electrical Engineering department at UC Berkeley.  A professor notices that he is an exceptional engineer and would love to take him on  as a project lead for one of his research projects. He accepts  the position. Fast forward a few months Edmond is working on an experiment that  emits highly energized particles. The rig isn’t set up yet but the EE professor wants so preliminary results so that they can submit a grant proposal. He warns Edmond that if this goal is not met he is at danger of losing his job. Edmond neglects to install the appropriate safety systems and runs the experiment anyways in fear of disappointing his PI.

Q1. Who is at fault here? Edmond for accepting the position or the professor for threatening Edmond, and/or for offering him the position?

Q2. Was this conflict of interest easily avoidable?

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In this case the conflict of interest started when  Edmond accepted the job as project lead despite his current position. The professor should have also seen this as a potential conflict of interest and avoided proposing such an arrangement to Edmond. Edmond should have also refused to carry out the experiment without appropriate safety measures and should have reached to higher ups. The professor should not have deviated from protocol by pushing Edmond to run the experiment. This conflict of interest could have easily been avoided at the start and generally there are systems in place to make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen.

There will be more situations added later on in the creation of the guide and it will be implemented using an online survey website in order to be able to reach as many people as possible. Through tools such as this hands on situational guide, we believe that conflict of interest education is very feasible and simple. With the response of engineers to a guide like this, we will be able to determine whether or not there is an increase in understanding of conflict of interest. If there is, we hope to improve the guide and push for greater implementation. If there isn’t an increase in understanding of conflict of interest, we will adjust our hands on guide accordingly.