Looks like he ordered trains that were too tall, risking issues with tunnels, turn engineering, derailment, etc, and got caught by people who actually did know the engineering and science involved. Some things require credentials because it's evidence that the person knows what questions to ask, what to look for, and how to plan within the constraints of their domain of expertise.<p>This guy could probably do a great job supporting a person or team that had the right training, but his ignorance was risky, regardless of his intentions.<p>I've seen the flip side, too, where PhDs have given awful people license to behave badly, inflicting their "expertise" on people as if it made up for the lack of diligence and follow-through, leaving destroyed companies and people in their wake.<p>Gotta have the work ethic and the training - the institutions behind formal engineering disciplines do a great job of ensuring they qualify the people who will put in the work and know what they're doing.
This is more than just a fake resume.<p>He claimed to be an engineer, which is a profession with real formal qualifications, because there are real consequences (e.g. buildings falling down, bridges collapsing, people dying.)
Hence why throwing around the term "engineer" in software is silly. There's little consequence to misrepresenting yourself in software, other than your immediate employment and maybe a financial lawsuit. In other professions, enforcement has real teeth due to the stakes of failure.
Railway engineering... 15 years career, which tells quite a lot about a lot of things, generally nothing good. Best aspect is it doesn't seem anyone got physically hurt in "the process of career progression". Quite scary.
>He had started working at Prasa 15 years earlier, shooting up the ranks to become chief engineer, thanks to his fake qualifications.<p>This is the bit I find remarkable. He actually did the job for 15 years and moved up to chief engineer.<p>Was he actually a good engineer or did his performance not matter at all for his career progress?
"However, the court in Johannesburg heard that he had only completed his high-school education."<p>He could have been a "software engineer" no problem. No engineering degree needed.
given the demographics here, i can imagine for many of us the first impression was "someone lying on their cv for a tech job got caught".<p>but "real" engineering (as my core engineer professors used to snark at us) has real-life consequence and many countries have laws for holding their work accountable. this is just an example of that but to save face, they are focusing on their credentials in this case.<p>as an "engineer" in tech myself, i really feel that our industry misappropriates a lot of these terms, at least for job titles. i am all for naming consistently this way, but we need to also treat what we do in the same lens then. like the recent crowdstrike incident would have also resulted in jailing someone, but not sure if we need to be that serious about it.
> earning an annual salary of about 2.8m rand ($156,000; £119,000).<p>> he had forged a job offer letter from a German company, which encouraged Prasa to increase his salary<p>> He was also at the forefront of a 600m rand deal to buy dozens of new trains from Spain, but they could not be used in South Africa
Interesting. In the Netherlands our prime minister candidate was killed a while ago. Killer was on the street within ten years. Imagine that? Someone killing Kamala Harris and being allowed on the street again after ten years?<p>Volkert van de Graaf. Look it up...<p>Compared to that 15 years is quite excessive...