I think that is the beauty to this post it wasn't one person... However, Jeff Atwood seems to be the main contributor. He was also the co-founder of Stack Overflow.
Your comment was very inspiring. At the risk of saying too much, I find myself in a similar situation, where the culture of my workplace doesn't seem to jive with productivity or the way I work. I think another danger of a workplace is the idea that appearance is more important that quality of character.
Anyone can put on a suit and tie, but the ability and desire to fix problems isn't inherent in everyone. I've been at government contracts where they overvalue the employees who dress well and don't value those that look them straight in the eye, tell the truth and deliver in a timely manner.
It's probably not coincidence that the former environment I spoke of was also a government contract.
Government work is hard for the reasons you mentioned, and also because generally, contracting pays well enough to price you out of other markets.
My exit strategy was to find a government vendor (e.g., that makes products for government / enterprise consumption) vs. a government contractor. The services side of the house is still pretty much a suit-and-tie affair, though we pride ourselves on being much more meritocratic than our customers, but on the engineering side, pretty much anything goes.
The one thing I will say about gov contracting is that as a result, I interfaced with much more than would have been in my normal comfort zone, and I came away from it MUCH more knowledgeable than I would have had I not done it at all, and the work was very rewarding. My advice is to hold out for the good parts as long as you can while quietly looking for a way out that seems fulfilling.
Thanks for the advice. I've slowly been moving to the more technical side of the house since I graduated school, because I got hired on as an "Systems Engineer" that wrote power points. It was great in that I learned to deal with customers and push my comfort zone, but it also left my coding experience woefully insufficient for a time.
Luckily, I'm a step closer to what I want to do now, and I can fill my time with Udacity/Coursera classes when there is an abundant amount of downtime. I do have my eyes on the prize (which would be working in a faced paced and supportive environment) but I'm still building my skill set. It's just good to know that other people have been where I am and approached the problem logically to finally get somewhere that there was a better fit for them.
I plan on moving away from government contracting in general soon. I find that while they do pay well the constraints they put on the work just isn't worth it. If the company doesn't own the system that they work on then they don't tend to care about it in the same way.
I'm in my 20s and have never touched a type writer. I use the two space method almost exclusively because that's what I was taught. Sure I mess it up sometimes, but this article does make a fantastic case for why to use it for parsing. If I do mess it up that will show in my parsing, and I'll be able to go back and fix the spacing in the future.
I think that something a lot of people who read this are forgetting (and please correct me if I'm wrong) is that most of us have 4 year degrees and/or jobs in Software Engineering (or at least Engineering).
These courses are meant to be a segue into free courses offered online that people can use in lue of a 200k four year degree. While this form of education isn't there yet, it's use builds the reputation of these online courses.
If cheating runs rampant in the courses (more so than in person classes) it has a chance to negate the reputation of these sites. This could set back "free" education for years.
While I don't think that Cheaters should have an affect on what we can learn and take away from these classes, but it will have an affect on how much employers (like edw519) trust the courses. If they don't trust the online classes, then people who don't have a formal education won't be able to use these freely offered classes to raise their earning power.
Another solution would be to employ an alogrithm that checks your solution against past solutions. It would work much like what professors employ when they submit Reports to an online repository.
If someone it stupid enough not to even change variable names then they'd be caught easily. While with Millions of solutions it would be easy to get some replication, most of the time there wouldn't be any and this is when manual intervention by a person could be triggered.
This in conjuntion with your solution would work pretty well especially if someone submitted a wrong answer for another question that they haven't seen.
Use an algorithm to cross-check homework submissions, checking for structural copying. If a high correlation is found, as with human intervention, you suspect cheating but cannot prove it.
So, only for the potential cheating students, issue an extra quiz at some scheduled time, and discard the homework score. These quizzes should be all issued in parallel batches and last an hour or so, so solutions can't possibly be copied among cheaters. Make sure the quiz is actually harder than the homework, conceptually.
In other words, rather than trying to punish potential cheaters, just keep testing them until you're sure they're not cheating. This is better IMO than producing a 10x size problem set and selecting random subsets, because the number of suspected cheaters will probably be a small-ish percentage. Therefore, rather than having to write a ton of etra test material for everyone, you only have to write a few extra quizzes for a subset of the class.
So far, majority of the functions in the Scala course homework have been one-liners. Mostly without any new variables that one could name. This kind of problems, a lot of people write the exactly same answer, down to every single character.
I agree with you, but that is mostly because I already have a 4 year degree in Engineering and I'm assuming you do too. There is a problem in the fact that many people cannot afford that degree because their parents can't afford it (or the loans that they'd need).
Cheating degrades the quality of education at any level. Cheaters are trying to get accreditation when they shouldn't. While Cheating is all over in education (we had a couple of cases at my school), it is obviously going to be more prominent in a place like Coursera, where cheating is easier and looking for cheaters is harder.
One thing they could do is create an algorithm that checks answers much like what they do for journals, but again that's an extra load they "shouldn't" have on their employees.
I would argue it hurts after the cheating, though possibly not precisely when it occurs. Later courses, things that build on what was cheated, that kind of thing. Time (and money, and happiness) must be spent to deal with people who aren't prepared, degrading the quality of what the legitimate ones receive, and the educator's time.
There is a big crediblity difference between taking random classes and completing a program in a university.
The university has the onus to hire credible teachers, and to maintain a high reputation. You're paying for the standards they apply. Some universities aren't worth their weight and some are. The information that they have is out there. This has not changed. Textbooks have been arround for a while. Additionally professional teachers have the ability to communicate the material affectively.
Online classes can't guarantee a level of understanding of the material. Additionally online classes will never be able to guarantee that the person who signed up for the class is the actual one that gets the credit.
The algorithm for checking answers in journals is to send it to a panel of other people in the field, ask them if it checks out (obvious errors, overlooked things, etc.), and publish if it does. This model has already broken down when people outright fabricate results, it has missed blatant plagarism, and overall is largely dependent on all the parties being honest.
It wouldn't work at Coursera's scale and for a price point they can afford.
Coursera has a huge amount of data and could create their own algorithms that check for similar code in the database. It wouldn't be perfect but it could do simple string comparison against other work.
People shouldn't let cheating degrade the quality of education. You either possess the skills or you don't, and if you don't you shouldn't act like you do. It'll probably be obvious. Here's the scenario in my mind...
A: "Oh hey I know how to program Scala"
B: "Ok program Scala..."
A: "Well I only got the cert, I don't actually know."
B: "Sorry I guess you're not qualified then. Why don't you learn?"
Yeah that sounds like a great interview. How long do you let them go, half an hour, a day? Do you think you can adequately judge someones abilities like this?
I think it was more of a broad sketch of a series of interactions, not a formula for an interview. Someone represents themselves as having some skills because they are certified as having those skills; they are asked to apply those skills; etc...
Your format implies more formality than a normal conversation - I assumed you meant it in terms of an interview too, and if not that, I'm not sure what you were aiming for. I don't see conversations like that outside technical interviews.
I know matplotlib comes with Python(x,y) but that's a pretty awesome one too.