One is discussed in the OP. The other URL was https://twitter.com/Linkletter/status/1385004344903290883, but that doesn't give any background. There's more here:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/22/21526792/proctorio-onlin...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-v...
Edit: It turns out there have been quite a few previous threads too. Pointers to those at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26907558.
(like me)
Apparently it's a supervision software that students are forced to install on their private computer and (as expected) it'll do its worst to invade your privacy and flag "suspicious" things, based on which the university might punish you.
"Suspicious" here means wearing glasses [3] or looking around in the room or blinking too much [4] or having eye and/or skin colors [1] that are difficult for AI to track or reading questions out aloud [2]. Because everyone knows that a good student is white, sits in a bright room, and will continuously stare at his/her PC screen while thinking about a difficult math problem, I guess. WTF?
I am so glad that this kind of abuse was not yet common when I was in university. I love sitting in the (dark) basement, it helps me concentrate. And I tend to close my eyes a lot because it helps me visualize the problem. I'm sure this kind of misguided software would have failed me.
And the worst part is: Bugs in this software will fail students in the real world. [4]
So it is crucially important that this type of software receives a lot of scrutiny to make sure it works as planned. But it seems that Proctorio is suing this guy for doing exactly that: Documenting how the software is supposed to work by linking to Proctorio's YouTube videos.
[1] https://twitter.com/uhreeb/status/1303139738065481728
[2] https://www.insider.com/viral-tiktok-student-fails-exam-afte...
[3] https://proctorio.com/frequently-asked-questions
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/g2ub05/god_kicked_out_...
They've moved to Lockdown Browser without the recording, and to Zoom proctoring. In my opinion, neither are particularly effective measures against cheating, and I'm sure they are trivially bypassable.
The effect of these tools being phased out is that exams now must be harder or less student friendly. Typical practice in some of my courses has been to not allow students to go back to answered questions, while giving large amounts of questions with insufficient time. The exams are scaled, but I can imagine people doing worse in this kind of stress.
Giving students different exams (selections of slightly and subtly different tasks from a task pool), not showing task names, and mixing up the order of tasks for each student seems to work quite nicely.
The increased overhead to communicate which exact answer they need, finding out which other student has the exact same task, etc., has worked really well for us. Of course, you have to have it in a way where they do not have much time left over to shoulder this overhead.
Edit: So students are going from "What's the answer for 5" to sharing the topic of the task, the task description (there may be a negation hidden in there), and the constants and other students needing to compare. Maybe they aren't even at this task-type in their exam yet, as the order is mixed.
Edit2: We weren't really watching the video stream. It was just to discourage students actually sitting side-by-side, which would decrease the communication overhead drastically.
As for alternative options, most my classes used open book paired with more limited time restraint, possibilities of questioning students if anything looked suspicious immediately after the exam, and making the tests harder and scaling afterwards. Although there'll always be bad apples, I'm thankful many of my profs has adapted very well to help the students learn.
Student's post: https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/hgiiu1/midterm_started...
Proctorio CEO's comment (u/artfulhacker) got deleted back is on removeddit, Linkletter is also here defending the student as well: https://www.removeddit.com/r/UBC/comments/hgiiu1/midterm_sta... https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/hhbowl/proctorio_ceo_m...
I think at the very least, all exams ought to be designed as "open book" with a time limit. that at least eliminates the issue of students using unauthorized resources. I'm not sure what can be done about students who collaborate on exams or go so far as to hire someone to take it for them. perhaps a few students could be randomly selected for each assessment to explain a few over their answers over zoom?
Think of it another way. If you knowingly contract a member of the KKK to do your hiring, you can't pretend not to know why people of color don't get hired in your company.
Proctorio's issue may be more subtle than the "in your face" example I gave above but they're there and whoever contracts them does so with full awareness of them.
P.S. Because I'm sure the wave of downvotes is less about people supporting racism and more about ignorance, let me further support my point about such tech with real life examples:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5gxg3/proctorio-is-using-ra...
https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22254631/university-of-il...
Why would you say that this is evidence of a 'screwed' system?
It's all a lot of smoke grenades to cover for:
- an education system/process that at its core is not about actual learning but "bulimia learning" aka memorizing the facts the profs deemed relevant for the exam and forgetting them the very second the exam is over to make space for new useless stuff that will be forgotten just the same way.
- an employment system that has "optimized" to needing as-standardized-as-possible papers that certify potential employees of having skill X so that hiring managers can easily separate between candidates that are "worth it" on paper without having to waste time on "unworthy" candidates - something that obviously fails as it chucks out a lot of the people that aren't built for bulimia learning but can't prove that (unlike an awful lot of the "certified" people) they actually know what they're doing
- "education" institutions that are more interested in getting grant money and income from student tuition rather than on training actually talented students
- and as a root cause of all of that: employers believing they need "university graduates" when the good old German-style apprenticeship system works just fine... with the side effect that apprenticeships cost the employer actual money for years for training the apprentice, whereas with university the students and their parents pay the bill for, sometimes, the rest of their lives
Education and employment is in dire need of reforms. Universities should be serving only those who are actually interested in science, companies should pay for educating the workforce they need instead of forcing generations of young people to take on unsustainable debts, and schools should be reformed to actually provide stuff people are going to use in their later career.
That doesn't mean there isn't a violation here, of course.
The distraction this posed had a measurable impact on my scores on these tests.
What's crucially important is that this type of software is BANNED. I now have a new question to ask schools when my kid applies to one.
Of course, like all religions, not all members will follow the beliefs all the time. At least that's what I tell myself while sinning with a non-free video game I installed. Many a pastor has molested children, but the courts still recognize those religions. So when the founder of this religion is caught duel-booting Windows, we'll just remember that the religion is divine, even if the people aren't.
Seriously, the day my university required this would be the last day they received a dime from me. And I’d be getting a refund for the current semester.
I really hope institutions using this rethink and the company just dies.. some things should not exist.
>And I tend to close my eyes a lot because it helps me visualize the problem
Nvidia has added eye-correction feature to it's Maxine platform(SDK with set of ML features for video conferencing) it can correct our eyes in real-time to show that we're looking at the camera even when we didn't. When I first saw it's demo the first thing which came to my mind was these proctoring tools[1]. It's a matter of time before all major video conferencing tools add these features or 3rd party plugins/hacks which enable it.
I'm not against these proctoring tools, Especially since there are not many options during lockdowns but considering what's at stake they deserve all the scrutiny they can get and if a company threatens with lawsuits for genuine criticisms it tells a lot about their business practice; Sadly this seems to be very common in the e-education sector(Checkout unicorns claiming to have placed 10 year old in Google after taking their 'coding' class and the retribution faced by activists for showcasing the lies).
Apple demonstrated this in Facetime about a year ago, but I don't know what happened to it. I don't use Facetime, so I can't confirm it was ever implemented. But clearly it's on big tech's radar.
> LSU student body president Stone Cox said that the fees, which could come out to $300, were prohibitive for students.
What the hell? Not only are universities mandating students infect their systems with malware, but they're making the students pay for the privilege? That's ridiculous.
Thankfully, it's a good filter for deciding which employers I don't want to work for. I can only imagine what it's like working for a company that trusts their employees that little.
https://gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=Rb._Amsterdam_-_C/13/6846...
> The Amsterdam Court of First Instance rejected the request by student representatives and an individual student for a preliminary injunction against the use of digital surveillance software for exams by a public university. The court ruled that measures against covid-19 did not allow for a suitable alternative and the processing could therefore be based on Article 6(1)(e) GDPR.
Can't install shady third party drivers, can't install stuff like that that mess with hypervisors (and anyways, every app kind of runs in a sandboxed process anyways) and your app can go in the background at anytime!
Don't like it? Roll your own devices.
We hardly need more entities pushing for this dystopia...
Yet you could only link to one example for a totally different program ExamSoft.
They had a thick dark beard above a dark shirt and dark glasses with reflections (on a much lighter skin tone). They also look like they have a second eyebrow due to the lighting on their eye lid and glasses.
It could be their head shape tied to their race I guess, but you have a sample of one from a different program which we know nothing about what it's doing.
> "or reading questions out aloud [2]" > "I am so glad that this kind of abuse was not yet common when I was in university. I love sitting in the (dark) basement, it helps me concentrate."
Compared to going to exam rooms full of people with noise and lighting outside of any control? When were students allowed to read out loud in the 'old' days?
We are in a pandemic, millions are dying, I don't get this attitude, what's the alternative? not do exams? I know I cheated, I know most other people at uni cheated with the old system which was hard to cheat at. Hell yes we would all cheat more if the new system allowed us to.
The videos in question are still on Youtube under Proctorio Reuploads for what it's worth.
this is some serious 1984 type shit.
Procto-: Anus; (more frequently) rectum;
-torio: radioactive chemical element (in spanish)
Therefore, it is a radioactive anus?
GoFundMe page: "...My name is Ian Linkletter... wired over $50,000 to Arvay Finlay, LLP, doubling my legal defense fund. John Trueman is joined by Cathie Boies Parker, Q.C., and Mark Underhill..."
Different lawsuits?
Have an upvote.
There is another HN thread on this and a lot of people in it are more upset about the line of work Proctorio is in and how they do it than the fact they sued this minor irritating student. My opinion is there is simply no easy pain free way to do fraud auditing and that's that. I just recently took a professional PeopleCert exam online with a guy watching me through my webcam in a closed room I had to display in advance etc and temp installed some invasive application. So what ? If there was a better way to deal with the unfortunate fact that some people will cheat then I would be all for it but just getting all shook up about a temporary set of specific restrictions for a singular type milestone event is a little unrealistic in my book.
But I am glad suing this kid is blowing up in their face.
I was a TA in a prominent CS university. We used software that would compare everyone’s submissions to see if things were copied. The penalty for getting caught was high, and we made it clear to everyone that this software was, while not perfect, capable of detecting simple tricks (like copying code and renaming variables).
Nonetheless, after every project, I would go and have to manually review all the cases. There would be 10-20 severe cases, about 30 moderate cases, and then about 50 cases where some things might look suspicious but there wasn’t enough proof to act.
Overall, we would penalize about 20-50 people per project (granted this is a class size of over 1000). But still, 2-5% would still cheat despite our repeated warnings that we could catch them.
I shudder to think what would happen if we had no way to detect.
While TAing there, I was also a student. Cheating was pretty much the norm. I was always a cynic after those experiences.
Why do the mods/dang do this? Is it just to avoid multiple stories on the same topic on the home page? There’s got to be a better solution than this. At least providing some sort of log of changes would be helpful.
Oh cool, so the EFF is gonna claim a false DMCA filing. I hope the student will be made whole financially after what he had to go through; apparently he's been fighting this for a year.
> A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly in-fringed.
In these situations, lawyers are renting out their credibility to bully people who can’t afford to go to court even if they’re in the right.
edit: severity in relation to an actual copyright violation, not possible damages imagined in the accusers theoretical situation if the content was not removed. Some companies might gladly eat a fine if only 1/100 people challenge their sick interpretation of the law and it keeps the bad PR from getting out. I could bore you with far worse scenarios but I will not aid the authoritarians with any further information.
Why in the world would a company sue a critic, under weak legal arguments, thus buying themselves this kind of terrible negative publicity? Who will trust/like/or want to be associated with them now?
I guess that this is to suppress criticism, but it must be expensive and difficult to do the same in every jurisdiction in which critics pop up, so it looks like a dumb strategy (let alone immoral).
I mean the guy seems to be educated and good citizen, works at a Uni, you can publicly read his views on twitter. THe kind of person I tend to sympathize with. Without knowing who Proctorio is, I imagine them being the kind of company I don't want to be associated with, just because of this.
I don't understand.
It’s almost like suing any ‘cafe’ with ‘cafe’ their name after you start a business called ‘cafe’. Except this is the type of corporate stoogery that much of the outdoors community particularly loathes.
So yes the large outdoors company sicked corporate lawyers on small businesses who can’t afford legal fights to bully them into removing the very common outdoors term from their name. This caused a huge backlash and boycott and is why I still refuse to shop there and instead shop at rei and others.
That incident shows how corporate decision makers can be completely out of touch with their customers, their market, and reality.
In that way they also create a floor of wealth and/or visibility for people to realistically qualify to criticize them. Those people are more likely to be investors than critics.
It also proves to investors that they can defend themselves and are not risky.
In fact, winning the case may not even be that important to the firm.
There are too many like me, in different jurisdictions, who cannot be silenced like this.
And I'm still in awe that a modern democracy like Canada, would allow their citizens to be threatened using their legal system. It seems corrupt.
And I think losing this case could get very expensive if the defendant manages to convince the judge it's a SLAPP case?
This fact alone should shine a very bright spotlight on Proctorio and by proxy, the educational institutions that force students to install it on their computers.
They have nothing to lose, except a comparatively small amount of money.
Given that the CEO has previously gone on Reddit to bollock a student complaining and post part of the private support chat log, this may not necessarily be a rational decision. Sometimes just a single vindictive and nasty C-level person can set these things in motion.
They're not designed to be won, they're designed to be an annoyance to those that are being sued, dragged on as much as possible, and incur as many legal fees for the defendant as possible.
The end goal is simply for other people's self-censorship to kick in. As in, when other people want to criticise Proctorio, there's a chance they're gonna stumble upon this lawsuit and decide against speaking up.
Highly recommend this John Oliver video. In my opinion, it's the best one they've ever done with an absolutely magnificent ending: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN8bJb8biZU
This is about the company sueing someone for criticising the software, by detailing how it is supposed to work. So even if we accept that we need such software, do we really want to go down the path that software companies can sue people for talking about how it works and criticising them?
How can this garbage lawauit be allowed to go on and cost a man $100.000 in lawyer fees??
On the software side there is no easy way to do fraud auditing and that's that. I just recently took a professional PeopleCert exam online with a guy watching me through my webcam in a closed room I had to display in advance etc and temp installed some invasive application. So what ? If there was a better way to deal with the unfortunate fact that some people will cheat then I would be all for it but just getting all shook up about a temporary set of specific restrictions for a singular type milestone event is a little unrealistic in my book.
To your second point, the US legal system is extremely litigious, so I don’t know how you turn that ship around. I agree that this should be thrown out as a frivolous suit and the student should be compensated for damages— legal fees, time, psychological stress, etc.
My own college struggled with online exams, and turned a deaf ear to students and even professors objecting against the platform being used (it's the most popular proctored exam platform). In the end, due to their own incompetence at handling exams, there turned out to be large-scale cheating and the college then forced the entire batch to give the exams again in the next term.
Turns out, it's incredibly easy to cheat on those exams.
Students of color are getting flagged because testing software can’t see them - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26745582 - April 2021 (21 comments)
Student Surveillance Vendor Proctorio Files SLAPP Lawsuit to Silence a Critic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26250800 - Feb 2021 (40 comments)
Parents demand academic publisher drop Proctorio surveillance tech - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506007 - Dec 2020 (106 comments)
Proctorio used DMCA to take down a student’s critical tweets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25002730 - Nov 2020 (116 comments)
An ed-tech specialist spoke out about proctoring software. Now he’s being sued - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872084 - Oct 2020 (6 comments)
EduTech Spyware Is Still Spyware: Proctorio Edition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24450248 - Sept 2020 (9 comments)
Do they have systems to catch or prevent pervy teachers or proctorio employees who repeatedly watch recordings of students wearing revealing clothing, having wardrobe malfuctions, engaging in sexual activity without realizing they're being recorded, etc.
How many pedofiles has proctorio caught? If it's zero, I don't think they are looking at all.
I really hope that universities will consider their students before adopting this type of software.
“ Hello,
Thanks for reaching out! I'm following up on your request. I want to let you know that no one at Proctorio has access to your information. Only authorized personnel at your school (Instructors or Administrators) can access any of the information collected while taking an exam.
I'd be happy to discuss this further with your instructor if you would like to connect me to them.
Best,
Josh”
Olin charges $55,612/year tuition fees alone; the total costs are estimated at $79,024/year[1]. This is a lot higher than a lot of other "normal" universities[2], and even seems higher than most "top universities"[3].
I'm sure it's great if you can afford it, but most can't.
[1]: https://www.olin.edu/admission/costs/cost-of-attendance/
[2]: https://uscollegeinternational.com/2019/10/03/cheap-engineer...
[3]: https://studyabroad.careers360.com/articles/engineering-in-u...
Plus, many schools are moving towards a co-op/hand son/project-based model, even public ones. University of Waterloo is such an example, and many state schools I know are also transitioning into a project-based model. It's not that more expensive than testing - especially given the fact that everyone has a computer, 3d printers and workshops are relatively cheap, and most undergrad projects aren't that expensive.
Students tend to get internships, pay for their school, and move into high paying jobs immediately out of school because how much experience they have, even if they have to give up some theoretical basis. That being said, Olin generates many grad-school students that do well at research.
As a technologist I've worked in "online bullet loans", payments and other controversial verticals but for the life of me , I would never work in such a dirty business (as Proctorio). I'd rather tell people I work in porn-tech (where people are literally f*d) than this asinine proctoring systems.
Just... no.
no, they read it and think "how can we do even better"
It's straightforward - a well-designed examination should allow for adequate distinction between students, allowing everyone (who studied the course and learned) to show basic knowledge, and those who have more advanced understanding to demonstrate this.
In designing assessments, questions were peer-reviewed to ensure they are not "easily googleable". They were designed to focus not on asking "what is X?" but on "tell us a way that Y could be achieved" or "give an example of how you would do Z". These questions are pretty hard to google, and time pressure makes it harder still.
Focusing on understanding, and applying knowledge really seems to be the right way to design an exam. I can say from what I've seen and heard from colleagues so far, this approach is giving equal (if not more) differentiation among students than usual - the good students still perform well, and the poor students still perform poorly. And personally (from experience), I find it a more enjoyable to sit an exam that asks you to answer meaningful questions, than one that simply expects you to memorise and recite facts back. We're not bothered if you memorise the name - just describe how you'd solve the problem.
From the number of people doing poorly even on fairly straightforward questions, I'm not hugely concerned that giving the exam online made any significant difference. A non-trivial number of students didn't even complete a mandatory question (which was clearly marked), so I assume they found it suitably challenging, even with access to the world's knowledge at their fingertips. I'd say that's a good exam.
As expected, it turned out to be a colossal failure - students found the remote "invigilators" didn't pay attention for jack shit and started cheating in exams, leading to the college forcibly bringing the entire batch back to their campus and taking all the tests again along with the ones in the next term.
> In Linkletter’s view, customers and users were not getting the whole story. The software performed all kinds of invasive tracking, like watching for “abnormal” eye movements, head movements, and other behaviors branded suspicious by the company. The invasive tracking and filming were of great concern to Linkletter, who was worried about students being penalized academically on the basis of Proctorio’s analysis.
In an in-person invigilated test environment, the invigilator/proctor is watching students carefully for suspicious movements and behaviours. We don't call that an invasion of privacy. While I don't like commercial proctoring software (I have to use some, not Proctorio, for students who can't enter the country because of Covid-19), being videoed by a machine while you do a test is a) not much different from everyone else in the class who's being watched in person (you probably get watched less, actually), b) a way to make sure essential academic standards are upheld. No one is going to get penalised based on some fallible "AI" system; "suspicious" events get reviewed by a person and usually aren't suspicious at all.
https://www.insider.com/viral-tiktok-student-fails-exam-afte...
I don't much like such software, but I accept the current need for it. The problems people are describing seem to be faulty staff behaviour, not software.
If you absolutely need this type of monitoring it should be done at some sort of testing center on cleanly imaged computers. I could see it being done for something absolutely crucial such as a bar exam.
Proctorio and its ilk should not be used for simple mid-terms or even finals. This monitoring software becomes a huge crutch to lazy administrators and teachers. I should know I am lazy too.
PS While we are on the slippery slope, if Proctorio becomes standard we rapidly head to Snow Crash situation where federal jobs were heavily monitored. Already many freelancer sites use screenrecording software.
Why? How did we ever produce lawyers in the past without Proctorio?
I don't think it's a slippery slope. We will have significantly more local students than remote for the foreseeable future, and the local students are invigilated in person. We have students wanting to opt into remote study, including using this software, but so far if they're local we tell them no (except under extreme circumstances).
There are real concerns around privacy with software like this - what will happen if some criminal finds an exploit in Proctorio's software? This kind of monitoring software is often designed to be hard to detect or bypass, and installs itself in ways that are challenging to remove. Development of this kind of software should be done with a high degree of caution and care. There isn't a risk that an invigilator will be compromised by a malicious actor, and then see every detail of students lives and all their private data for all time. But this risk does exist for software.
If Proctorio takes legal action like this against critics what does that say about their software?
I agree about the privacy concerns, and in normal circumstances I wouldn't use proctoring software, because all my students would be local (or they would have signed up as distance students knowing this kind of thing would be needed). I would also have much less issue with it if it was open source.
I see it as a currently-necessary annoyance, as the least bad option. The alternatives have greater deficiencies: human invigilators using Zoom etc. don't scale (institution experience); oral exams don't scale (my experience moderating such assessments); no invigilation leads to cheating (by few students but enough to be a real problem, especially for professional qualifications - my direct experience and institution experience); shutting down education until the pandemic's over is unfeasible.
> "suspicious" events get reviewed by a person
Being taped and having that tape scrutinized after the fact is not equivalent to being in the same room as an invigilator. I could accept a live video call as being roughly equivalent, but not if it’s recorded.
That's a fairly classist assumption that someone has multiple devices, including some older piece of junk that's late model enough to be useful for test taking but still essentially a "throw away." It implicitly means that adequate right to privacy is only reserved for wealthy kids and not for anyone who only has one computer.
That's not to suggest that I support this assumption even in cases where it's true. I'm just trying to point out a common blind spot that leads comfortably well-off people to often act with callous disregard towards those who have less because it isn't a big problem for themselves.
Btw how does the system work in Canada, after he wins this, will he be able to sue for damages and strip Proctorio clean or what?
The video was used for Forever Young by Youth Group. But this is the original footage, from Australian TV, from 1976. Waaay before even the original Forever Young, by Alphaville in 1984.
I went to record a complaint but you have to be the owner, so I threw it in the too hard basket.
Of course there are a lot of creepy software and sleezy businesses around. That is not the issue. The issue is the university administrators - the MBA style morons who overtook the universities - who subject their students to such a crap software. On the other side one can argue that that is really preparing students for the real life - after all they are going to come to the industry and will be subjected by the MBA style morons in the management there to the crap like Jira, Scrum, Slack (how being forced to constantly broadcast your status and be immediately responsive is that much different from Proctorio?), etc.
tl;dr: someone examined a bit of the JavaScript code. Proctorio DMCA'd it.
If any current or former employees of a flagged company apply for a job on my team I expect their reason for leaving to be for ethical reasons, or for them to tell me about how they had ethical problems with what the company was doing. If they don't I immediately remove them from the candidate pool.
I agree with you that I think working for this company and not having an ethical objection is a red flag.
But the interview environment is fraught. Is it really obvious that no candidate would think "this question is a trap"? There's a lot of interview advice that says your answer to this question can only ever hurt you, so be as bland as possible.
Some employers want compliant employees who don't rock the boat. Some employers will hear complaints about proctorio's software and hear "SJW shit".
I don't want to work for those kinds of employers, but I sympathize with people who want a job and might fear that their honest answer could be used against them.
Ultimately, I think I have to come down on this policy being a bad idea, however understandable.
Seems like terrible advice to me. If someone gives me bland answers I'll assume they're a bland person.
> Some employers want compliant employees who don't rock the boat.
Good for them, I do. I want people who are willing to stand up for what is right and say "no".
... that you'll badmouth them in the future too,
... that you are the type of person who will cause drama by speaking behind other people's backs,
... that you don't know how to accept and recognize your mistakes ("it's not me, it's them")
... that you are not as nice to work with as any of those other candidates who didn't badmouth their previous employee when given a chance
... and so on. The interview process is biased enough against you to be worth the risk, specially when there's so little to be gained from it.
In complete transparency, I left because I didn't get paid enough - not because of ethical reasons.
Just-out-of-college me was sold hard on the argument: "Good students who work hard and don't cheat are getting screwed over by bad students - cheaters. There is no solution for this in online classes. We need to build one"
In hindsight, it is crazy how long a simple argument, being ethical itself, can rationalize other shitty decisions and compromises. It's kind of like a religion or a cult when you are in it. Constantly surrounded by other people who are drinking the same koolaid as you. You might feel a little uneasy, but hive-mind grabs ahold of you and when you see other devotees to the company vision, it soothes that uneasiness. Which no...is not good.
It wasn't until I was no longer an employee that I saw things much more clearly. In the "name of justice", we built an unethical product that fucked over many students. Plain and simple.
You know the phrase.
The road to hell... Good intentions...
Who appointed you moral judge of others? You discriminating against candidates based on their moral views unrelated to their work is no different from discriminating based on religion or political party affiliation.
It is legitimately within your purview to ensure that that a candidate doesn't have moral objections to the work they'll be expected to do, as well as look for legitimate objective red flags such as previously embezzling from an employer.
But the idea that you'd appoint yourself as some kind of moral purity guardian is deeply objectionable in a world where people legitimately disagree in good faith over ethical issues. You should re-examine this.
Well, they got appointed the judge of others when they were put in charge of figuring out if it would be a good idea to hire someone for the company.
Having moral red flags is a perfectly valid thing for a company to be concerned about. Immoral employees are at risk of doing bad things, and can hurt the company.
> based on their moral views unrelated to their work
It is pretty related to the work though. It is directly about the moral decisions that they made, while at work. Specifically it would be for working for that company that is doing immoral things.
Privacy issues impact every team. The threat of SLAPP lawsuits impacts every person willing to exercise their freedom of speech.
If someone has worked for a company that does privacy invasive unethical things then it's reasonable to assume they'd be fine with doing privacy invasive unethical things somewhere else.
It's not an invitation to badmouth, it IS an invitation to discuss the ethical concerns involved, and why you found it acceptable (even if it's just that it was a meal ticket until you found something you objected to less)
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
I also take exception to comparing a protected class to something like ethical behavior. I would never filter candidates by protected class and no one else should either. Past unethical behavior is absolutely something you should consider.
Look at my website (in my bio). I've done unethical things in the past. I expect potential employers to question me about them.
I keep thinking 'Proctology'.
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-proctorio-behalf...
One is for a student by the name of Ian Linkletter from British Columbia.
EFF is suing on behalf of Erik Johnson from Miami.
The only thing they have in common is Proctorio.
Some performed so poorly that I could only conclude that they cheated their way all the way through their program, because the discrepancy between their GPA and the fact that they can't even begin to explain memset (one of many trivial examples I ran across) was so stark. Well, all that cheating certainly caught up with them when they were face-to-face with me trying to get a job. It must of been stressful and humiliating for them as they sat there hemming and hawing while I asked them elementary question after question that they couldn't even begin to answer. Or maybe not, depending on whatever lack of pride and sense of self-worth led them to cheat like they did in the first place.
I'm sure many of them managed to get a job somewhere in industry, and whoever hired them got to deal with a hire who turned out to be an imposter.
Of course I recognize that some people may have been severely impacted by the technical interview process to the point that they were intellectually paralyzed. But at least some of them I'm sure just didn't learn anything.
However, every year there would be a good amount of students that did the follow up courses, that would not even know how to define the simplest function, use/define a list, etc, when I was trying to help them work on the practical exercises. These were weekly voluntary 4 hour labs in which we were available to help them and there was no performance pressure.
Somehow they always had a solution by the end of the deadline despite getting stuck during the labs. Of course this was often clearly copied. However, I was strongly discouraged by the lecturer to ever make an issue out of this, even when at one point a student handed in a copy with someone else's name on it. Basically the university barely dared to formally accuse students, and the lecturers also didn't want to deal with the hassle.
Most of these students ended up passing the module, and later on the whole course. It made me really sad/frustrated.
It did help setting expectations when performing interviews for software engineers at certain companies I worked in the past. I would ask a candidate to use their most comfortable programming language and would start with a simple version of a problem to get them in their comfort zone. Sadly, I would often have to simplify that multiple times, and ended up with candidates that could not write a single function, for loop, while loop, interface, class, or any other component of the language they actually wanted to use.
For instance, I don't code in C that often, and if asked, I'm not sure I could remember off the top of my head if the function signature is `memset(dst, value, n)` or `memset(dst, n, value)`. My guess from intuition is the first, but I would be hemming and hawing a bit if asked in an interview something like that.
Also, many CS programs are easy enough that you'll never even encounter a memset.
Knowing this context might actually explain the situation that the parent comment describes a bit better. It is absolutely possible, as you described, to be perfectly capable within your CS niche without ever bothering with memset. But in that case, you probably won't pick C as your interviewing language and won't state that you are proficient in it. Which is what, I suspect, might have happened in that scenario the parent comment is describing.
Like I said, "Of course I recognize that some people may have been severely impacted by the technical interview process to the point that they were intellectually paralyzed."
> I'm not sure I could remember off the top of my head if the function signature
That would be a terrible question. Of course I wouldn't ask that.
From the Greek "anus"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/procto-#English
I am dying lol
Which is from the Latin "procurator" meaning overseer, unrelated to the Greek procto-
https://www.hemantmedicam.com/product/usb-video-proctoscope/
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/proctor
Though in fairness proctor / procurator are extremely antiquated english words, that have survived in common usage only in the US for some reason.
