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It strikes me as odd that the very qualities that we value in engineers (efficiency, outside the box thinking, finding solutions that make the most of the cons

It strikes me as odd that the very qualities that we value in engineers (efficiency, outside the box thinking, finding solutions that make the most of the constraints of existing systems) are the ones we detest in engineering students. This is even more true for jobs that are meant to exploit inefficiencies in existing systems, such as entrepreneurs.

crayboff 4y ago
If you're using that as an argument for why cheating should be allowed, you're missing the key part of what what education is supposed to be about: understanding the fundamentals well enough that you can think of of the box and find solutions without relying on someone to always be there. Would you really want to work with a software developer who doesn't understand how functions, loops, etc work?
- Psychlist 4y ago
  I have, it was pretty awful. At one stage I did a 3-4 week mad panic crunch to fix a system where he managed to hide the problems until it was almost too late. He was the "reverse talent" sort of person, prone to coming up with insane solutions that took more effort to unwind than it would have taken to write it in the first place. But only 20% of the time, so we'd often be left with 80% usable-but-bad code, and 20% WTF code. The crunch was me re-writing everything except the user interface. Apart from that one incident when I copped it, mostly I felt bad for my team leader who had to babysit the guy all day every day. After the incident above it was changed from "supervise experienced guy" to "babysit". That company really struggled because they were using a niche language to solve a very niche problem. It was the right language for the problem, but it was very hard to find developers who had used it, let alone who were good at it to the point of being useful in their first year with us. So throwing out Captain Useless took a couple of years.
geysersam 4y ago
It's not the only quality we value. We also want people to be able to learn new things, and be hardworking when needed. I'd personally prefer bridges in the future not being built out of paper-mache just because it was easier than using concrete.

crayboff 4y ago

If you're using that as an argument for why cheating should be allowed, you're missing the key part of what what education is supposed to be about: understanding the fundamentals well enough that you can think of of the box and find solutions without relying on someone to always be there. Would you really want to work with a software developer who doesn't understand how functions, loops, etc work?

Psychlist 4y ago
I have, it was pretty awful. At one stage I did a 3-4 week mad panic crunch to fix a system where he managed to hide the problems until it was almost too late. He was the "reverse talent" sort of person, prone to coming up with insane solutions that took more effort to unwind than it would have taken to write it in the first place. But only 20% of the time, so we'd often be left with 80% usable-but-bad code, and 20% WTF code. The crunch was me re-writing everything except the user interface. Apart from that one incident when I copped it, mostly I felt bad for my team leader who had to babysit the guy all day every day. After the incident above it was changed from "supervise experienced guy" to "babysit". That company really struggled because they were using a niche language to solve a very niche problem. It was the right language for the problem, but it was very hard to find developers who had used it, let alone who were good at it to the point of being useful in their first year with us. So throwing out Captain Useless took a couple of years.

geysersam 4y ago

It's not the only quality we value. We also want people to be able to learn new things, and be hardworking when needed. I'd personally prefer bridges in the future not being built out of paper-mache just because it was easier than using concrete.