You're making a pretty awkward value judgement about what a "good" engineer is, but you're describing an unethical one with a bizword like "value engineering". I realize ethics are no longer understood by much of Western society because the culture teaches transactionality, worships trickle-down economics and greed, and hyperindividualism.
> It isn't that. It's pressure at the shelf that does it. Consumers behavior simply does not reward equivalent-feature products with premium components that claim (true or not) to have a longer lifespan. Unfortunately, they will buy based on their uninformed sense of quality first.
This is a failure of marketing and buzz of the sales channel(s) and manufacturers to educate properly, not the failure of the customer.
A good engineer is one that has a job, doesn't put their employer out of business, and produces work that fulfills the requirements they're given.
Many people think there's some unethical conspiracy going on, and consumers actually want a product that lasts a long time, but companies are refusing to give it to them. But this is projection of individual preferences on to the market as a whole. Consumers want cheap shit that is in fashion, and their buying preferences prove this time and again. Maybe you want a 50 year old toaster in your kitchen, other people are buying products based on other factors.
If consumers really wanted to pay a premium for high duty-cycle equipment with premium lifespans, they can already do that by buying commercial grade equipment. But they don't.
If you are familiar with the history of home appliances, you'd probably come to appreciate the phrase 'value engineering'. Even poor people can afford basic electric appliances now because of the ingenuous ways that engineers have designed surprisingly usable appliances out of very minimal and efficient designs.
If you look at ads for electric toasters 100 years ago, you'd see they cost over $300 in today's money adjusted for inflation. Thank god for value engineering.
A good engineer provides value to society. If they fulfill requirements that are bad for others then they are not good engineers.
I seems to me that there is also a social dynamic to things. If consumer grade products become a race to the bottom then it is going to become more difficult for regular people to purchase products which aren't low quality. There's also a degree to which society (e.g. in the form of government policy, cost of living adjustments, etc.) factors in differences in prices.
The fact that poor people can now afford to own some household appliances isn't a huge value to society?
It completely changed the way our societies operate. I think it is a good thing that people have the option to buy crappy washing machines, rather than being forced to use the washboard and bucket my grandmother used. Yeah, they sometimes do develop a bad belt, or the timer mechanism might fail. But it beats being unwillingly forced into homemaking as a career.
The world only has so much wealth to go around, and that isn't the moral quandary of the engineer picking an item on a BOM on Tuesday morning to fix. If anything, squeezing a few more pennies out of that BOM is going to lift some people at the fringes out of poverty. At the opposite end of the product value equation, every unused and functional component in every product that is no longer in service, is wealth that is wasted that could have been spent elsewhere.
Engineers are to consider public safety first. This is not negotiable for real hardware engineering. Poor people could always purchase used appliances.
I agree that products shouldn't be unsafe. And value engineering does not mean making products unsafe.
> Poor people could always purchase used appliances.
The reality in mid 20th century US demonstrates this isn't the case. Most went without the modern appliances that are commonplace today.