Not quite. You mention two possibliblities…but they are not equal.
If he had absolutely no idea: then he should step down.
If he was behind the whole operation: he shouldn’t “step down”. He should go to jail.
Along with all the programmers who wrote the fraudulent code, the supervisors who checked it,and the engineers who tested it.
I’m sure there are a lot of people at VW working in the dead of night destroying documentation from the programming department.
the problem I’ve frequently encountered with outsourcing software development is it usually ends up being handed to a bunch of people hammering out code with no idea what the thing they’re coding for actually does.
PCM code would likely not be outsourced given it has to be developed in concert with the hardware (powertrain) it’s controlling.
Step down, hell. This is a time for ritual disembowelment.
Volkswagen May Never Recover From This Mess | HuffPost Impact
This does not bode well.
There is market speculation VW as company may not recover from this. Kaput. Stick a fork in it.
there are a number of people who think Sergio Marchionne has found a new merger/takeover target.
He had a bug up his butt.
I have highlighted the erroneous portion of your OP that is causing the confusion.
I believe in their cultural tradition It’s immolation in a bunker rather than disembowelment.
Definitely. Every VW diesel made in the past 6 years does this. Given the amount of effort that goes into designing cars, it must be an “open secret” in engineering, and there have to be high-level managers who knew it was going on.
So, perhaps Mary Barra at General Motors can stop worrying about that creepy stalker that keeps showing up outside her office? 
That’s passe. Now it’s suicide by defibrillator.
For the sake of these employees, I hope not. One thing federal prosecutors (and judges) really, really, really, don’t like is intentionally destroying evidence or otherwise interfering with an investigation. Ask Martha Stewart (and lots of others)…
I’m just thinking of the manufacturer and the range I work for, if there was a program like this in our vehicles the tech guys would absolutely know about it, and us in the service end would also know all about it. Not only do we spend a lot of time looking at fuel efficiencies, we also spend a lot of time looking at the electronics while trying to fix various faults. Its hard to think we wouldn’t have noticed it happening at some point on some vehicle.
If this was our brand I would say with absolute certainty that it wasn’t some rogue engineer, that the designers, senior engineers and absolutely the senior management knew all about it. So in my opinion the VW senior guys knew exactly what was happening in their vehicles, it was a calculated business decision that they discussed and decided was worth the risk.
Now its time to pay the piper. I’d say the CEO didn’t even lose any sleep about resigning, he knew he was toast and he knew it was always a possibility.
There are cases where the buck stops at the top and the CEO falls on his sword. This is different. This corporate scandal is a little surprising. Kevin Drum: [INDENT]WTF Volkswagon?
(Quoting Mark Kleiman: Page not found – The Reality-Based Community)
[INDENT]Now just think about the depth of corporate depravity involved. This wasn’t one rogue engineer or engineering group at work. People up and down the chain had to be party to the crime. And note that the conspiracy held together for six years, and was finally broken not by an internal leak but by the work of outside scientists at West Virginia University. Wasn’t there a single decent human being around when this was being planned and carried out? [/INDENT][/INDENT] This is the Stanford Prison Experiment at work, not a rogue engineer or even a rogue engineering team. There is talk of criminal penalties, which is basically unheard of for top 100 multinationals in high income countries. The top guy really has to go.
It’s already taken apretty steep dive.
Not quite the 54% drop Enron suffered in August 2001, but about on a level of BP after the May 2010 oil spill. Definitely in the CEO has got to go range.
(FTR I have no management experience of any kind, so take my opinions with as large a grain of salt as you consider appropriate.)
I was thinking about this news.
It is certainly true that the CEO of a huge organization can’t be personally aware of everything that his subordinates do or don’t do. Neither is it practical or possible to have half the company auditing and monitoring the other half to make sure that deceptive and dishonest acts don’t happen. But he or she is ultimately responsible for the corporate culture and other pertinent business functions such as the vetting and hiring of employees. Still you’d think somebody else in the company would have caught the team responsible for the deceptive exhaust readings. I mean, wouldn’t just having done an internal audit on 1% of the production have been sufficient, eventually?
I think resigning was the right decision.
I’m surprised it took him as long to resign as it did. He had to have known of the case before the decision was made - the Telegraph is reporting that the German government knew of defeat devices months ago.
Like Quercus said, this would just add to their misery. you can bet that there’s already a legal hold on any and all information, documentation, and code related to this.
eh, I don’t know. I’m perfectly willing to give Winterkorn the benefit of the doubt; a CEO is not going to be attending open-issues meetings or conducting code reviews. at most he might get an executive summary saying everything’s hunky-dory and the “clean diesel” program is meeting all targets.
stuff like this usually happens in the lower-to-middle management layers.
This actually baffles me. Just when the company needs experienced leadership to weather the shitstorm of lawsuits, fines, and recalls, they fire the guy in charge. That’s sort of like throwing the captain off the stern of the ship once a storm appears on the horizon.
Granted, the CEO might have been complicit or he might not, but in any case, resigning is, in my opinion, a cheap out – a sop to the investors. You want to atone for your mistakes? Slash the CEO compensation to $1/year and make him deal with the next five years of unrelenting hassles while VW attempts to ride this one out.
So Finagle, you want the CEO with such piss poor judgment that got you into this mess, who probably was complicit in breaking national laws in numerous countries, who most certainly was a party to if not the director of a conspiracy to break these laws, to be your head man and face or your company going forward.
Is that really your plan?