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I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

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Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#561

Post by grayfaced »

jdkaim wrote: post #7

Update: I immediately took down my class project site after receiving yesterday’s ultimatum. I still don’t think the simple demo site violated the letter or spirit of the registration rules, but I took it down because I always want to operate in good faith. They followed up today to thank me for doing it, but also indicated that they were putting a hold on my account anyway. As a result, I am not going to be able to…

Find out what "agree to work" means, they may have very different ideas then you on what effort they're asking for. Also you only need to be in good graces with registrar office until classes begin. So maybe just say what they want to appease them then make long timelines, slow roll and eventually ghost when you have your diploma. "As a solo dev this will take over a year", "I don't want to stress the API during registration season", "My employer doesn't allow me to work on volunteer projects"

They're using bureaucracy to save face for themselves. Once this is out of view, they're going to forget about it.

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#562

Post by flybarrel »

jdkaim wrote: post #7

Update: I immediately took down my class project site after receiving yesterday’s ultimatum. I still don’t think the simple demo site violated the letter or spirit of the registration rules, but I took it down because I always want to operate in good faith. They followed up today to thank me for doing it, but also indicated that they were putting a hold on my account anyway. As a result, I am not going to be able to…

| I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.

Please do not plan based on anyone's goodwill only, especially in this one you have such a high stake. I'd at least consult a lawyer at this point, even if it means you don't take any legal action.

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#563

Post by mrguyorama »

pshirshov wrote: post #507
donalhunt wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having been on the IT side of student registration, it's a major undertaking for the teams involved with thousands of students to be processed in a fairly short window. Downtime of any type during the registration period has a major impact so I'm not surprised that a university is being cautious with a 3rd party system connecting and potentially causing performance or downtime issues.

Thousands is nothing, maybe the code should be written and tested more carefully?

It's worse than that, throwing all 60k students at the registration system at the same second with no automated waitlist is a policy decision.

Registration at my school was a zero stress endeavor because those features are built in and very good in College admin software on the open market, for at least 2 decades.

What is very likely is that UW considers something about staggered enrollment "unfair" or not right for everyone, so prefers the absurd freeforall, and therefore polices any attempt to bypass that freeforall "fairness" as unacceptable.

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#564

Post by [deleted] »

croemer wrote: post #556

His (presumed) dad commented this on LinkedIn: > I have seen all the emails now and it's as bad as described. I thought there might be some hyperbole but the "University Registrar and Chief Officer of Enrollment Information Services" is clearly saying "work with us to build this for free or you're not graduating". They even specify that he needs to set up the meeting "well before registration opens on February 13th f…

[deleted]

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#565

Post by TeMPOraL »

dekhn wrote: post #548
phibz wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their response on face value doesn't make sense. But if I had to guess, you inadvertently made someone in the registrar's office look bad. They probably had to answer to "why didn't you think of this?" If that is the case then it makes a lot more sense and is retaliatory behavior. You can't undo their insecurity and loss of face. Therefore you should not expect a reasonable response. Act accordingly. Educate yourself…

Yeah, let me give some perspective here. There's somebody in the registrar's office whose job is to be responsible for the production process of registration. They are minimally staffed and given just enough resources to run that process. Likely at some point their leadership told them they had to make an API so that they could integrate with other systems. Due to poor funding and lack of skills, just doing that is a…

> They lack knowledge and context about how to build production systems that handle the load during the registration crush and also don't cause undue load on the backend API servers.

That sounds like a cop-out. Sure, students may not know about all this, but they're also not building Google. Many people run businesses without caring about such things just fine. Most things don't require six nines of reliability and people don't expect them to be this reliable. Students in particular are used to university systems being constantly down, or resource-starved to the point of uselessness for no good reason.

> it's often easy to come up with a naive solution without understanding the context, that kind of works but that actually makes things overall worse. For example, what if your app crashed the registration backends during the middle of registration. Are you, the clever student, on call during registration (24/7) for your app, and in contact with the folks who run the registration backends?

It's hard to come up with a solution that's worse than what you get at universities for this stuff, which usually is nothing at all - and even if it is something, there's no one on call to help the student anyway.

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#567

Post by astockwell »

Over2Chars wrote: post #393
jdkaim wrote: post #7

Update: I immediately took down my class project site after receiving yesterday’s ultimatum. I still don’t think the simple demo site violated the letter or spirit of the registration rules, but I took it down because I always want to operate in good faith. They followed up today to thank me for doing it, but also indicated that they were putting a hold on my account anyway. As a result, I am not going to be able to…

@jdkaim do the project as a way to say you're sorry, give them the work uncompensated (effectively they're charging you the value of your degree, I'd assume that's not trivial). Once you have your degree, you can go from there, hire a lawyer, sue for uncompensated labor (something about minimum wage laws, I think, requires they pay you), and so on. Maybe even some emotional distress. But hey, IANAL and ya gotta do wh…

This is probably the right answer. Similar to "dont fight the police on the street, fight them in court". Can even quiet-quit during the project if you need to.. software can take an awfully long time to build..

Also, track your time during the work. And keep all correspondance. Paper trail, paper trail, paper trail.

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#568

Post by w0m »

nisegami wrote: post #380
mbreese wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that those integration points are intended to be used by University owned and operated services. Having a service that the University doesn't control wanting to do this would be difficult to get approval. Student data is highly protected (legally), so access to it through another application (where the operators could see other students' data) is problematic.

That makes sense. Now, with that in mind, a reasonable response to OP's request would involve just saying "no". Maybe even politely explain why, but that isn't required.

Yep; that's where the story as-told seems fishy.

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#569

Post by lowercased »

buildbot wrote: post #508
lowercased wrote: post #413

> Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate. I'm really baffled here because the code Kaim published is itself MIT licensed. The university could use it…

I would be really shocked if that part actually happened. Major state universities don’t blackmail random students to write software for them. They make RFQs and send them to companies. There’s a software procurement process. 0 chance some person in the registrars office is taking this persons code off github and deploying it to UW production.

Colleagues of mine at a local university often have students work on projects that get used by various departments. Nothing as big as a registration system, but data reporting UIs, data collection forms, etc. Usually paired with a senior staff member, it gives the students some hands on experience, and helps the dev dept get a bit more done (in theory - in practice, not always).

Taking the OP at face value, someone saying "build us a version of this" doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility, but again... whatever was demoed is already MIT. Absolutely no reason the school itself couldn't build on that (inhouse or out-sourcing).

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