Earlier quoted context omitted.
People have no idea how many times in a interview (especially with big corps) I end up talking with a PM and he tells me "Yeah, I started here already as Project Architect after my cs degree. I really don't like coding or anything related so I never do it, I focus on architecture and guide the others". And then I mentally run away.
This is a fantastic was to end up with a code base 15 layers deep with each layer converting the properties of one object to properties on another object. It sure looks pretty in architecture diagrams though.
As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
231–240 of 303 posts
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
A big tactic the fakers use is to paraphrase everything everyone else says. We had a guy in our team that literally paraphased everything said by anyone else in the stand up. E.g. you could say we're waiting on the dba team for a qa db (grr large multinationals and their asshat dbas), he would seconds later say something like 'i think whats currently delaying our progress is waiting on the dba team'. Last I heard he…
"Fakers, cheaters, bullshiters are everywhere unfortunately" We are. Source: I am a master-level bullshitter. Professional lobbyists and politicians ask me to make introductions, use my network, etc. Here's the weird thing, though: I'm a software developer. A pretty good one. Not the best, but top 20%. I know tons of Natural Bullshitters like myself, but I've never met another one that was a software engineer. Dabble…
I wouldn't call myself a professional bullshitter, and I wouldn't still have a business after ten years if I didn't have substantive knowledge of what I do.
However, my cultural and family background is in the humanities. I spent most of my adolescence and teenage years on my programming hobby, like many people here I think, but the route to a tech career was a rather incidental one. My parents are philosophy professors, and I entered university with a political science major (switched to philosophy), before dropping out two and a half years later to pursue what was by then an ascendant tech career.
The discord between my background and the psychology of typical software engineers and business guys has led to amusing, sometimes infuriating cultural clashes over the years.
Nevertheless, I've got the comment more than a handful of times over the years that I really should have been a writer or do something involving lots of speaking. You can probably tell from this comment alone that I'm not a person of few words. As I get older, this has seen me enlisted to assist with marketing copy, résumé polishing, LinkedIn profile formulation, and a variety of other tasks that require putting a spin on things and drawing on one's facility of rhetoric. Some have said I'm a lawyer on the inside, combining the logical, left-brained, procedural qualities of a programmer with a knack for wordsmithing eloquent pleadings.
It's a weird space to dwell in. The real nerds think I'm a bullshitter half the time. The real bullshitters think I'm a nerd who lacks the social jujitsu to really hobnob with Visionaries like themselves. Beats me.
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#233This is hugely important as a lot of people see programming as a ticket into higher-end jobs and will spend as little time as individual contributors as they can. The idea that "oh, they'll get caught in the workforce" is not correct - quite often the plan in the mind of these folks is that they will try to fake their way through and be moved up into project management, technical marketing, etc. and never have their…
Here's the trajectory: Fake your way through basic CS courses. Find your way into group-work heavy projects in later years, possibly doing enough ancillary aspects of the work to be semi-useful. It will be likely that your other group members will find it easier to grin and bear it. Optionally: do a Masters or PhD. Plagiarize your work, or potentially hire someone to do it for you. Continue into the work force, focus…
One thing with science on the side of truth is that the simplest questions (such as "what's the difference between a boolean and an integer?") can have extremely complicated and deep answers that lead to crazy discussions about formal definitions or implementations on different platforms and etc. And these are the kinds of things you can only learn by actually learning them, and trying to bullshit their way through an answer will quickly paint the faker in a bad place.
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#234Why do those students even need to cheat? Harvard has a 97% graduation rate and Stanford 93%.
This allows them to inflate their graduation rates by weeding out people in disproportionately difficult courses.
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#235What they call "cheating" is how I do my job as a developer of a 3-person (dev) software company. We make software. People like it and use it. We make money. Who cares whether the code came from our head or from something publicly available on the internet, or from someone willing to help us? As long as it wasn't an actual violation of the law. There's no good reason to create a separate set of laws for the classroom…
A student handing in dead code either doesn't understand it or didn't care to go over it after copying. Either way, that's not someone you want "looking up answers" on Google as a professional.
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#236I would love to read an article which is like: "I cheat because X..." "I cheat because Y..." "We cheated because Z..."
In other words, an article or a study based on an anonymous survey. Straight from the horse's mouth.
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
What companies let fresh CS grads start as Project Architect?!
They normally start as a project analyst, product management assistant etc
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#238This is hugely important as a lot of people see programming as a ticket into higher-end jobs and will spend as little time as individual contributors as they can. The idea that "oh, they'll get caught in the workforce" is not correct - quite often the plan in the mind of these folks is that they will try to fake their way through and be moved up into project management, technical marketing, etc. and never have their…
We should be hiring English and Sociology majors to be PMs and marketing people.
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
A big tactic the fakers use is to paraphrase everything everyone else says. We had a guy in our team that literally paraphased everything said by anyone else in the stand up. E.g. you could say we're waiting on the dba team for a qa db (grr large multinationals and their asshat dbas), he would seconds later say something like 'i think whats currently delaying our progress is waiting on the dba team'. Last I heard he…
"Fakers, cheaters, bullshiters are everywhere unfortunately" We are. Source: I am a master-level bullshitter. Professional lobbyists and politicians ask me to make introductions, use my network, etc. Here's the weird thing, though: I'm a software developer. A pretty good one. Not the best, but top 20%. I know tons of Natural Bullshitters like myself, but I've never met another one that was a software engineer. Dabble…
Re: As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
#240One of the big multi-week projects had a series of increasingly difficult questions about different aspects of a compiled program that you were supposed to figure out. We were told we could use whatever tools we were comfortable with using.
So I used a C decompiler and finished the entire thing in about 5 minutes.