When Engineers Lie
Twenty years ago, when I was writing Accidental Empires, my book about the PC industry, I included near the beginning a little rant about how good engineers were incapable of lying, because their work relied on Terminal A being positive and not negative and if they lied …
Context & Ripple Effects
Cringely reaches back twenty years to a rant near the start of his book [[a:-1|Accidental Empires]]: good engineers can't lie, because their work is checkable — Terminal A is positive or it isn't. The column lands amid what CNET's pickup called 'open hacking season,' with Sony and other companies breached despite presumably competent engineering staffs, which is precisely the case where the old axiom breaks.
The piece also sits inside a long-running argument about who gets to interpret technology for the public — the same territory Marc Andreessen staked out in 2007 when he criticized non-technologists writing about technology. Cringely, a commentator rather than a working engineer, is here turning that critique inward at the industry itself.
First-order effects
- For breached firms like Sony, the column reframes the immediate damage: security postures presented as sound have failed the simplest test of engineering truth-telling, putting executives' technical claims under public scrutiny alongside the leaks themselves.
Second-order effects
- Companies facing this kind of exposure can no longer rely on internal engineering assurances alone, shifting demand toward outside auditors and independent verification of security claims — a market response to broken internal trust.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry's informal norm that technical work is self-verifying erodes into formalized accountability — external review, disclosure obligations, and reputational penalties replacing the assumption that engineers simply cannot lie.
The trend: High-profile breaches are pushing the industry from trusting engineering self-attestation toward external verification of technical claims, weakening a norm Cringely identified two decades earlier.