Quote:
Originally Posted by unclebilly
Amail - if what you design breaks and someone gets hurt, can you be held personally or professionally liable? Can you lose your livelihood and house? If you were a P.E. this is what is at stake.
Engineering is more than doing simple hand calcs based on tensile yield etc. Do you look at what happens should a part fail and predict what will break and the outcome should a component be incorrectly loaded? What about the socioecomomic effects of a given product - are these considered (not always a factor)?
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I do not shoulder the personal liability that I would as a licensed P.E., that's for certain. My designs are for offshore use, subsea for the most part, and are not mission critical. Failure of any of my designs would be a warranty issue if it were a workmanship or materials defect, and would be on the client's nickel if it were the result of mishandling.
For liability reasons we steer away from projects that could pull the company thru a knot-hole if something went wrong.
Still, engineering covers a broad range of disciplines from simple hand calcs to socioeconomic effects of catastrophic failures. I work in a band within that range.