A bit more context: He's an influential writer and speaker mostly in enterprise dev circles. By HN standards his resume isn't spectacular: he's not the founder of XYZ or the author of some famous open source project.
He's been a driving force in giving programmers in large organizations the vocabulary and ammunition to win arguments that lets them write proper software and not shitty software. If you find yourself writing Java in a bigco IT department and you want to introduce stuff like test driven development, code reviews, or whatever else is just proper engineering practices, reading/watching some Uncle Bob is probably going to help you convince your coworkers and bosses.
He has some rather controversial ideas (eg he believes that "flow"/"the zone" is bad and programmers should never be in it), but you don't need to agree with all of it to learn something useful.
Software developers are not engineers. We don't take a standard test and a board approval process for a license. Therefore we can not have the title of engineer because with that comes personal liability if someone is injured, killed, arrested, etc... Instead we get to wear the title like it was a cool fedora but when shit hits the fan we can toss it off and point to our employers as the people at fault.
As an engineer, you should go into cover-your-ass mode; make sure all of your work is reviewed, all tasks are cross-referenced to e.g. a JIRA issue, which in turn will have more names attached to it.
Software development shouldn't be a one-person job, that way, accidents are never a one-person responsibility. And criminal code should be caught in its tracks, too.
"However, the penalties for falsely accusing someone of a crime range from none at all to potentially decades behind bars. It all depends on how the accusation is made, the intent of the accuser, and what is being accused."
Well the computer is controlled by a human, and the rental company is understaffed (the article mentions "poor office management"). This is why I blame the shareholders. Great power, great responsibility.
You would think that for a crime report to be accepted it would necessarily have someone's signature on it. That person is where the buck stops.
Furthermore, you'd think that after word got out about this happening several times, the police would start to look at lot more sceptically at an auto-generated Hertz stolen car report.
As a summer job I worked security / CCTV at a large shopping centre. I'm not sure how many cars were parked there on an average day 1000+ would be my guess.
Whenever someone would find a security person to "report their car stolen" first order of business was to walk them around the car park and to check for their car on the CCTV cameras.
I don't think I ever came across a genuine stolen car incident. The lack of scepticism on the part of the police here is mind blowing.
That's not really applicable here, because Hertz doesn't seem to have accused anyone. It sounds like Hertz, either due to badly designed procedures or employees taking shortcuts, can lose track of which car a renter has been loaned.
This leads them to find that a car that their system says is not rented out and so should be on the lot is missing [1]. They then report that missing car to the police.
The person with the car gets detained and maybe arrested because they were found in possession of property reported missing by the owner, not because they were accused of anything by Hertz. So at most Hertz would face civil liability under some kind of negligence theory.
[1] In most of these cases, the same lot with the missing car should also have an extra car present that their records say is out with a renter, so the total number of cars in the lot should match their records. There should be a sanity check somewhere that says if the total is correct, but a car is "missing", then they should identify the extra car, contact the renter who supposedly is out driving it around, and find out if that person somehow got the missing car.
> They then report that missing car to the police.
We're playing with words. That's an implicit accusation, our car is missing and we believe someone stole it. Furthermore, the last person to rent it out was X.
I'm sure you can spin this around legally, but the spirit of the interdiction against false accusations applies, one should not be able to play with the power of law enforcement and cry 'wolf' in jest, it's a critical public resource with grave consequences.
None. The question of liability for automated crime reports is an interesting one, though. One would assume there is a person responsible for the operation of the computer in question.
