The profession in Argentina and professional ethics
Signing a drawing or a report commits the personal responsibility of the person who signs. Everything else —the license, the scope of practice, the code of ethics— is understood starting from there.
01What the degree authorizes, and what it does not
A university degree certifies an education. What entitles you to practice is the professional license (matrícula), which is granted and overseen by the professional councils. In electronics and telecommunications, at the national level, the body is COPITEC, the Professional Council of Telecommunications, Electronics and Computer Engineering; the provinces have councils and professional associations of their own.
| Concept | What it means |
|---|---|
| Scope of practice (incumbencias) | The activities reserved to the degree: designing, directing, certifying, appraising, giving expert opinions. They define what each profession may sign |
| Professional license (matrícula) | The registration that authorizes practice and subjects the professional to the council’s ethical and disciplinary oversight |
| Technical supervision | Taking responsibility for ensuring that a work or installation is carried out according to the design and the standards |
| Professional commission (encomienda profesional) | The formal registration of the work with the council, which records who is responsible for what |
A professional signature carries civil liability —repairing the damage caused—, criminal liability when there is an offense or gross negligence, and administrative liability before the council, which can suspend the license. You do not sign “as a favor” or lend your signature: besides being an ethical breach, whoever signs is answerable even if they did not do the work.
02The code of ethics, in four obligations
The codes of the Argentine professional councils, and the international ones of IEEE and similar bodies, agree on the order of loyalties:
Public safety, health and welfare come first, above the interest of the client or the employer. It is the only hierarchy that is not negotiable.
Competence, diligence, confidentiality and honesty about costs and deadlines. Accepting only work for which you are qualified.
Fair competition, acknowledgment of authorship, no unfounded disparagement, and not taking on a job by displacing another professional without notifying them.
Keeping up to date, training those who are starting out, not lending your signature, and reporting illegal practice.
The hard part is not understanding these rules but applying them when they collide with each other. That is why it helps to have thought through the cases before they arise.
03Dilemmas to decide on before you face them
There is no obvious answer in every case, but there are clearly better and clearly worse options. Choose one and look at the feedback.
04Three cases that the whole profession studies
- Challenger (1986). The night before the launch, engineer Roger Boisjoly and his colleagues warned that the rocket seals were not reliable in cold weather. The decision was made anyway. Seven people died. The case is studied for the organizational pressure on technical judgment and for the difference between “it hasn’t been proven to fail” and “it has been proven not to fail.”
- Therac-25 (1985-1987). A software-controlled radiotherapy machine delivered massive overdoses to six patients, at least three of whom died. The causes: removal of the mechanical interlocks in reliance on software alone, a race condition in the code, reuse of software from an earlier machine, and a lack of risk analysis. It is the reference case in the safety of embedded systems.
- Diesel engines with cheating software (2015). A program detected the test situation and changed the engine’s behavior to pass the emissions measurement. It was not a mistake: it was a deliberate development, signed off by engineers. It shows that the most frequent ethical problem is not incompetence but obedience.
In almost every serious case there was someone who saw the problem and said so, and a chain of decisions that diluted it. That is why the codes require putting technical objections on record in writing: it is not defensive bureaucracy, it is the only way for the warning to survive the meeting.
05A gender perspective in engineering
Engineering remains one of the degree programs with the lowest female participation, and electronics and computing are among the most uneven of the lot. The figures vary by year and source, but the trend is consistent across the region: women are a minority among those who enroll, and the gap widens in decision-making positions.
The causes that research identifies are cumulative, not a single one:
- Before university: family and school expectations about what is “for boys.”
- During: a lack of role models, hostile or condescending environments, group work in which roles are assigned by gender.
- Afterwards: bias in hiring and promotion, and work organization that penalizes family caregiving, which falls disproportionately on women.
It is not only a matter of fairness: a homogeneous team designs for people like itself. The consequences are documented —from crash-test dummies based on male bodies to recognition systems that work worse for certain people—, and they are engineering failures, not merely failures of representation.
06Contemporary issues
| Topic | The professional question |
|---|---|
| Personal data | What is collected, for what purpose, for how long and who has access. In Argentina, Law 25,326 on personal data protection applies |
| Cybersecurity | An insecure connected device is a risk to third parties, not only to its owner |
| Artificial intelligence | Who answers when a system makes a decision: whoever trained it, whoever integrated it or whoever used it |
| Sustainability | Designing to last and to be repaired, as seen in sustainable development |
| Continuing education | Keeping up to date is an ethical obligation, not a career option |
07Activities
Download the code of ethics of the relevant professional council and choose three articles that could apply to a situation experienced in an internship or on a job. Explain how.
Research the Therac-25 and build a timeline of the technical and organizational decisions that led to each accident. Identify at what point a different decision would have prevented it.
Draft, in half a page, the technical memo with which an objection to an unsafe design would be put on record: facts, risk, standard violated, proposed alternative and a request for a written reply. It is an exercise you will be glad to have done before you need it.
08Ideas worth revisiting
- “My degree entitles me.” It entitles you to the license; the degree certifies the education.
- “If I’m ordered to, the responsibility is the boss’s.” A signature is personal and cannot be delegated.
- “Ethics is common sense.” Common sense does not resolve conflicts between loyalties; the code does establish a hierarchy.
- “Meeting the standard is enough.” The standard is the floor, not the ceiling: there are situations where meeting it is not enough to be safe.
- Believing that a lack of diversity is a problem foreign to engineering: it affects what is designed and for whom it works.
09Self-assessment
What is the difference between a degree and a professional license?
The degree certifies the academic education; the license, granted by the professional council, authorizes practice and subjects the professional to ethical and disciplinary oversight.
What is the first obligation according to the codes of ethics?
The safety, health and welfare of society, above the interest of the client or the employer.
What kinds of liability does the person who signs a project assume?
Civil, criminal and administrative before the professional council.
What does the Therac-25 case teach?
That in systems where a failure can harm people, safety cannot be entrusted to software alone: independent interlocks, risk analysis and specific testing are needed.
Why is it a good idea to put a technical objection in writing?
Because a verbal warning gets diluted in the chain of decisions. A written one forces a reply and records who knew what and when.
Why is a lack of diversity in teams also a technical problem?
Because a homogeneous team tends to design for people like its members, and that produces products that work worse —or do not work— for everyone else.
10Further reading
- Mike W. Martin and Roland Schinzinger. Ethics in Engineering. McGraw-Hill (Spanish edition: “Ética en la ingeniería”). The most widely used textbook: decision frameworks and dozens of analyzed cases.
- Nancy G. Leveson and Clark S. Turner. An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents. IEEE Computer, 1993 (free to read). The technical investigation of the case, written with a rigor that made it required reading.
- Diane Vaughan. The Challenger Launch Decision. University of Chicago Press, 1996. How an organization normalizes deviance until the risk stops being seen.
- CONFEDI. Libro Rojo: propuesta de estándares de segunda generación para la acreditación de carreras de ingeniería. Consejo Federal de Decanos de Ingeniería (Argentina’s Federal Council of Engineering Deans), 2018 (in Spanish). Defines the competencies —among them the social and ethical ones— expected of an Argentine engineer.