As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

After all, law now generally requires a $150k+ degree and three years of your life. Plenty of people, including Obama, believe that it should be at least shortened. But once entrenched, it's very tempting for gatekeepers to install expensive and lengthy credentialing procedures.

So overall, I think there's a good way to do this, and I do think that software development could be a better profession with some credentialing, provided it was done sparingly and properly (a huge "if", I must admit). I'd like to see this happen along the lines of the actuarial field, with exams rather than required degrees, largely because I think people should be free to acquire the knowledge at a pace that suits them. If you want to major in math, or physics, or something else, and "read for" the exams (to quote an old law practice), you should be allowed to. If we had something like this, it might benefit our field immensely. It would be a huge improvement over the capricious, opaque, and arbitrary informal exam taking we do over and over every time we interview.

But... I can't possibly pretend I don't understand your concerns. I personally was a math major and I got a MS in Industrial Engineering. I never did major in CS, I certainly didn't study "Software Engineering." I am also willing to openly question the value of test-driven development. There are plenty of people who think one or the other or both should disqualify me from the profession, and the idea of empowering them with the force of law (ie., the power to fine or imprison me for developing without the background and methodology they've decided is acceptable) is pretty chilling. That would be much worse than what we have right now.

And I'm not even saying "my anecdotal idea is wrong", because it is not. I've seen it happen that way, it doesn't matter if scale is smaller or larger.

I just highlighted another motivation / mechanic of cheating. And it happens the other way too, with men manipulating women. In my first job (not programming) there was a handsome guy pretty adept at this. He would say things like "(Stretching) It would be so nice if someone opened the window." --- 3 girls rush to open the window before they realize they're being manipulated. I wanted to add to the full picture of why people cheat.

But I'll show you how my original post in this thread can be generalized:

Some people cheat not because of peer pressure, time constraints, inability to understand, "because everyone does", collaborative ethos among computer programmers... but because other people spoil them, and offer to "help" them in exchange for perceived favors. It doesn't even have to be a sexual attraction thing, it can be "helping this guy because his father owns half the town". If you learn you have some perk that really makes other want do favors for you, you're tempted to abuse it more. Sometimes being good at flattery is enough!

Another explanation of this phenomenon is: people are more likely to cheat if opportunities are very easily available. But that facet is already mentioned in the article.

Other than your own projection going on in the first part, I'm not sure what you're actually saying. The fact there are not gatekeepers makes us more replaceable - some guy can take a bootcamp, work on some projects, and bam, he's competition. Programmers are acutely aware of this, and are constantly leveling up as a consequence. (And on that note, if there were gatekeepers, we'd probably be a lot more stagnant as an industry).

Also, I mean, common sense, it's constantly changing what tech and abilities companies require, so how is a gatekeeper system even going to work. I've gone from Rails to JS to TensorFlow, professionally, all in the last 3 years.

Speaking as someone who has spent considerable time in front of first-year college CS classes, attended SIGCSE conferences, and applied this in practice: trivially. Your "pointers-first" bias has long, long been debunked. Brown, Stanford, VT, and other CS departments have had fantastic programs teaching via OO-first methods for going on twenty years now. Studies of students taught this way have determined that they learn stronger design skills earlier, and have a greater focus on the problem to be solved rather than the machine being built. (At first: this is emphasis only on which skills are taught first.) Anecdotally, giving students a framework in which to understand why they're doing what they're doing early is hugely important. Then, a few semesters in, they do the deep dive into the minutiae that C, assembly, etc. afford.

This, in turn, is really no different than the era of pre-C++ CS instruction. Prior to C++'s big wave of popularity in the 90's, C was largely considered to have too many sharp edges for first-year CS instruction. Languages like Pascal, Modula-2, and even some Lisps were preferred to get basic algorithmic and data structures concepts across, with C generally relegated to the third semester or so. I'd call the common theme here "algorithmics and abstraction first" pedagogy.

C++'s burgeoning industry appeal eventually became a siren-song for many CS departments, who dropped the "not C first" pedagogical approaches and threw students into C++ right from the start. The result was generally disastrous. C++ is a terrible teaching language, with all of the sharp edges of C, with more in the OO/templates part. For contrast, Brown's program of that era used OO Pascal with a custom-built graphics library designed to be accessible to first-years, yet useful through senior project work.