Engineers stopped running such firms long ago cause they are totally inept at financial engineering. Its the financial engineers who run things, and you can bet right now whatever happens they will get the govt to bail them out. The culture will only change when financial engineering is reined in or part of tech/engineering education. Until then John Oliver will have a never ending supply of such stories from helpless engineers who are so out of control over anything they run to stand up comedians to cry about their problems.
As a half-engineer myself, I have to say this: people need to be reminded that it was engineers that were at the highest levels, CEO and down, behind Dieselgate and, yes, the issues at Boeing as well. Engineers are not per-se better at business ethics or corporate governance. Greed is universal.
Dieselgate was akin to a student learning the whole geography syllabus just before the exam, then getting a top score and claiming to be good at geography.
Just because you learnt the exact topics that were to be examined doesn't mean you're good at the whole subject.
Likewise, those diesel cars were very good at the exact things that were tested, and terrible at everything else. They were literally engineered to the exact test syllabus.
Yet we somehow don't call the student a cheater.
In my view, in both cases, the shortcoming is with the test/syllabus designer. The test topics need to be not announced beforehand, and the sylabus needs to not be rigid and narrower than the field in the real world.
Fact is, VW engines had a mode recognizing a test and adopted AdBlue and fuel mixture to meet emission standards. On the road, these engines ran dirty. That was explicitely stated to be illegal in the applicable laws.
It was all the other brands that played, as it turned out also illegal, games with temp windows and such.
Blaming this on regulators is putting this while story on its head.
This is flat out bullshit. The previous Boeing CEO under who the Maxes were rolled out and started crashing, was a career engineer at Boeing. The idiots that failed to add redundancy to a critical system, and hid all about it were also engineers. There is no magic "engineer good manager bad". People can be greedy and stupid and reckless and negligent regardless of their profession.
