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16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

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Re: 16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

#21

Post by watwut »

Waterluvian wrote: post #12
jjevanoorschot wrote: post #3

"Such kind of people give Women in Code a really, really bad name, because sweetie, it takes tonnes of hardwork, cutting through competition, persistent dealing with sexism and lot of patience to make place for yourself in this male-dominant coveted industry." It's quite ironic that in a sentence about sexism and a male-dominated industry, the author addresses the developer by 'sweetie'.

In my experience, "sweetie" is a word older women use condescendingly towards younger men or women.

Sexism is not limited to men on the side of who does it (nor on women on the side that is the target).

Re: 16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

#22

Post by kbart »

TomK32 wrote: post #14

Young women interested in programming rare enough, let her get some help, let her have all the praise, that's okay. In years to come she'll hopefully stick to the field and that's what is important. Not that she wrote 100% of her app. What we must never forget, writing the code is just the small part, marketing and selling software is the bigger challenge. She's obviously good at that and will prevail no matter what…

No, it's not ok, because as the original author highlights, such frauds diminish genuinely working women in tech (as is the author). For the same reason we don't give medals to the sportsmen that are caught cheating.

Re: 16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

#23

Post by ealexhudson »

I have to say, I found the "story" very leading. A lot of inconclusive evidence labelled a lot stronger than it deserves, especially the "confession".

The reality of a lot of app development now is that you can go a long way by not doing very much. Ok, so the git graph shows another developer committed many more lines: since when have we, as an industry, taken KLOC as a serious measure of anything?? Those lines of code could well be XML UI structures or a bunch of config spat out from an IDE.

Is she an amazing developer? No, she admits as much - she claims 10k lines of code, a bunch of which may have been StackOverflow'd, and she doesn't claim experience. She says she has trouble with Python.

Such a big deal over such a minor thing.

Re: 16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

#24

Post by theparanoid »

jacknews wrote: post #10

>> he “allowed her” to call the app hers, given certain “circumstances”. Is this the actual quote? It sounds as though we're meant to read more into it. The real author could well be a parent, but I guess we're meant to read that it's a suitor.

The "real" author was a contractor--it's common to see app development contracted out on UpWork. I wouldn't read much into the wording since he's not a native English speaker.

Re: 16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

#25

Post by mosselman »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #9
psergeant wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe sweetie is a gendered word?

It seems to be one of those loaded words that's often used by a certain type of man to put women "in their place".

So could be the word 'Geek', only to put smart people in their place, that didn't stop you from using it as a badge of honor in your nickname. So maybe you shouldn't blanket-accuse everyone of being a misogynist based on some hypothetical male character that you made up to fit some preconceived narrative of sexism, because that is in fact the true sexism here. There are plenty of people who use the word 'sweetie' endearingly, there is nothing wrong with that.

Re: 16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

#26

Post by radoslawc »

snarfy wrote: post #18
jjevanoorschot wrote: post #3

"Such kind of people give Women in Code a really, really bad name, because sweetie, it takes tonnes of hardwork, cutting through competition, persistent dealing with sexism and lot of patience to make place for yourself in this male-dominant coveted industry." It's quite ironic that in a sentence about sexism and a male-dominated industry, the author addresses the developer by 'sweetie'.

I was reading right along happily through the article, then I hit 'sweetie'. That came out of nowhere. I'm sure the author had a point they were trying to make, but it was completely lost on me with the condescending turn to 'sweetie'.

Completely lost? Stealing someone's work and pretending to be 16 years old programming prodigy is lesser issue than calling someone sweetie?

Re: 16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

#27

Post by gourou »

MarkCole wrote: post #17

This reads a lot like an attack. Yes its clear they did not program their app 100% themselves. I fail to see how it's such a big deal. Especially one that requires posts on multiple platforms targeting her. The other developers seem happy for her to take the credit, presumably as its good for marketing. Who is this really hurting?

> we don’t see him bagging MIT scholarships, or all the accolades the girl is receiving for her app

I guess she's worried that she'll get exposed further down the line and it would be bad for women who code in general

Re: 16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

#28

Post by radoslawc »

j-pb wrote: post #2

This is advertisement. They use her story to promote the app. Of course she didn't write the thing, no "child prodigy" that "released an app that will change the world" in the last 10 years of apps, did. It's either a political diversity narrative or emotional advertisement for a product. But yeah, let's all waste our time holding 16 old kids "accountable" for their "unethical" behaviour, like big boy adults do, that…

Right, let's not hold accountable 16 y old kids that do school shootings, those were only hormones.

Re: 16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

#30

Post by watwut »

tomaskafka wrote: post #15

> But after reading her blogpost, her stackoverflow/github history in an attempt to understand her struggles as a self-taught programmer; I figured that there was no struggle at all! Self taught programmers are full of numerous questions, but she didn’t seem to have any! Neither is there any progression of all the tasks she did. This is just one of possible approaches. For example, I actively ask very rarely, the mos…

This one jumped on me too. My history would quite the same and especially when I was younger. I would never ask under anything traceable back to me publicly. And I was always searching much more then actively asking, I asked online twice my whole life and got maybe one answer total.

I would also keep stuff on my own disk until I thought it is progressed enough etc. I was too insecure to show progress, because progress contains more mistakes and I dont like looking dumb. It also makes it easier to tear you down if someone decides to.

I mean, I have no idea what the conditions of that competition were and how much alone you was supposed to do it. I have no idea how much mentoring counts as too much and how much is fine. Nor whether this crosses the line. Just that, the above suspicion is dumb.

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