August 25, 2008 at 7:30 am
I don't think that there is a "fine line" so much as there is a huge environmental difference. Schooling may begin as rote memory exercises, but the core basis of higher education (beyond grade school) is that the students should learn how to learn. If they cheated in school, then the easy way out at work would be the comfortable choice: just ask someone else.
I do that sometimes, and I use the net for a lot of code examples and explanations that I wouldn't have easily found had I spent the time to work out the problem. At work, we don't learn to learn, we get the job done as fast as possible, because that is the implied rule. Whereas at school we learn the tools for analysis, at work we must use them as effectively as possible.
Having said that, I agree wholeheartedly with just about everyone on this thread. Cheaters always get their comeuppance. They may prosper, but it is short-lived. Additionally, those of us who have learned how to learn know fully well that, over time, job experience becomes less important than understanding the reasoning and logic behind all the code we create. This, IMHO, is what cheaters will never understand.
August 25, 2008 at 7:34 am
I'll most likely be crucified for this response but I cannot keep silent. The reason for this phenomenon is that we live in an evil world. People are basically evil, not good. The solution to this problem is the realization that there are consequences for one's actions; worldly AND eternal consequences.
I have always and will always maintain that my most prized possession is my personal integrity. It is the only thing one acquires while on earth that you take with you when you die.
Sincerely,
Bert
August 25, 2008 at 7:40 am
I don't think much has changed... At all. Every generation has always thought that the next generation was a bunch of slackers, whereas THEIR generation is the only one that did REAL work. "If you aren't using punchcards, yer not programmin'"
It's just the latest in the "get off my lawn" thought pattern. If I don't know an answer, I'll ask - whether it's a person or it's Google, it's not called cheating. It's called working.
Stealing test answers is different, of course. Misrepresenting your own knowledge base is wrong. But, there are countless reasons why such a transgression is a broad grey stripe, and not a thin red line. Can you think of 10? I can.
-----------------------------
I enjoy queries!
August 25, 2008 at 7:41 am
An additional thought.
Detection of cheaters appears to be an evolutionarily selected behavior (it also exists to some degree in other primates). Humans are actually fairly good at it, so that it takes a really skillful cheater to get away with it for long.
Some interesting psychological test have been performed to demonstrate this, where a complex logic puzzle is written two ways: one as solving the puzzle to identify a cheater, and the other as a neutral scenario. These puzzles are presented to test subjects. The subjects are much more likely to solve the problem when presented as a cheating incident then when presented in a neutral framework, even though logically the problems are identical.
...
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
August 25, 2008 at 7:57 am
blandry (8/25/2008)
Consider..."Failures are the guideposts on the road to success and every great invention in any arena had to be reached by the trial and error of the failure process."
If we stopped thinking of success and failure as opposites and realized that failure is part of the success process, maybe we would have less cheating, and more fulfilling, enriched and deserved successes.
There's one of those framed motivational sayings right next to my cube (right in the middle of IT), which goes something like:
"Successful people aren't afraid to fail"
Failure is a very effective way to learn, so you shouldn't shy away from failing should it happen. Just pick yourself up, build a better mousetrap the second time, and conquer the issue.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
August 25, 2008 at 7:58 am
I agree with most of what I've read here, and of course, I'm also frustrated with the lack of ethics in sports (e.g. underage gymnasts) and business.
In business it's especially frustrating because such lying and cheating isn't limited to younger people who have yet to mature. Many of our elders who should be setting examples for their families, peers, employees, stockholders and communities are cooking the books and misrepresenting the facts for personal gain.
But on a personal level, I believe that we can't afford to be too self-righteous. How many of us have downloaded songs or movies that we should have paid for? What about copying software that we should have paid for? That's stealing, isn't it?
By the same token, how many of us have misrepresented the facts to get our favorite candidates elected, when trying to make a sale, when completing a mortgage application (apparently millions of us) or when completing a job application?
Like Steve, I don't have any solutions, but I'd suggest that we start by taking a look in the mirror.
August 25, 2008 at 8:01 am
I agree with those that say cheating has always been there. Every time I hear or read anything that starts with "Todays younger generation..." I roll my eyes. It's the same thing our parents said about us, and their parents said about them, etc. I believe Plato lamented the lazy youth of his day, always trying to cut corners instead of working hard. The methods are different, the opportunities are different, but the end result is the same. Those that cheat lose in the long run. Those that work hard and really learn their stuff are eventually rewarded. Life is a marathon, not a sprint.
August 25, 2008 at 8:12 am
Loosely quoted from Steve "I don't know how to change it in this generation". Nor do I as a whole BUT, I can within my own family and that is my hope. As a father and a DBA, it becomes pretty hard to show a child work ethic when at the office much of the time and not having too many things to do around the house "so to speak". Considering that in most generations prior to the last two the fathers have been at home working at home teaching their children in work as well as in many other things. That is lost primarily in this day and we are going to continue to see the results from that. McDonalds work ethic, "if I can't get it done in 15 minutes, I ain't gonna try" seems to be the mantra rather than seeing the abundance digging in to solving problems. Ultimately I believe there is a two-fold ramification to this and Steve has touched on one. The other is lack of ingenuity, which is something that has made the current working generations most prosperous.
So, what does one do. Make sacrifices and make choices that are going to affect the next generation. I have made choices which have allowed me to work from home and made choices to live in locations where I can actually give my children chores to do and challenges to own. It gives them a sense of accomplishment and worth. Consider how you feel after a day of not accomplishing anything at work. Do you feel like you have wasted your day or that you have really had a great time?
Really, I could write a multi-paged paper on this topic but I will leave my comments to the above else I might be censored... 😉
David
@SQLTentmaker“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose” - Jim Elliot
August 25, 2008 at 8:13 am
I think the one thing I've learned over time is that cheating is a relative thing and depends on the environment you're in. I actually do use Google to look up answers to problems I don't know now because everyone else is doing it and it makes no sense to break my head over something and lose time when the boss really doesn't care. The same behavior can be considered cheating in one environment but perfectly acceptable in another. Basically cheating is defined by the rules in play; similar to the psychological tests jay holovacs mentioned.
I'm a gamer of sorts and I've noticed in some online games players would figure out something the developers wouldn't intend to happen and something that should've been hard and challenging suddenly became trivial, even though it was obvious the game developers wanted the task to be hard. When the next version of the game comes out suddenly that loophole is closed. Depending on the particular loophole, i.e. bug, you could say players were cheating (doing something the rules outright prohibit) or gaming the system (doing something not prohibited but which destroys the integrity of the system). Same thing happens in other systems and areas: online voting, email spam, speeding, taking performance enhancing drugs, not reporting certain taxable income or expenditures (my state wants me to voluntarily list the amount I spend on the Internet so they can tax me on it, somehow I always fail to remember and pay less tax), etc.
It's definitely an interesting area of study! If someone can get away with something they'll certainly try. 🙂 Whether you do or don't try I think depends on personal integrity, morals, and the situation.
August 25, 2008 at 8:17 am
I despise cheating, and I do think what goes around comes around. We play a lot of board games at home and we're constantly reminding the 6 year old that if he cheats, he isn't really "winning". Hopefully the lesson will sink in eventually.
I don't think that googling for solutions to problems you come across at work is cheating. That is research, plain and simple.
Regarding certifications, my feelings are mixed. I do not think that most certification test questions are pertinent to the actual job. Half of them require memorization of what specific methods and parameters on obscure sections of API do, which in my mind are things to look up when you need them. A person could be excellent at their job and fail a certification purely because they aren't a memorizer. Contrariwise, a memorizer with no actual skill whatsoever can ace a certification exam. I'm sure most of you who have ever been in the position to interview have come across those candidates - tons of certifications, can spout off textbook answers to questions, but do a great deer-in-the-headlights impression anytime you ask them to actually DO anything or answer a problem-solving questions with a real-work basis.
However, the reality is, if the person doing the hiring decision isn't a techie themselves, the only things they have to go off of are certifications, references and gut feeling. In the real world, sometimes the person making the decisions isn't a techie and they look at these certifications as an indicator, or maybe even just a screening process -- if you don't have them, you don't get the interview.
So, if a person who is really good at what they do finds that they aren't getting interviews because of the lack of letters or their boss says "get these certifications, we need them for our MS partner status"... and they take the exam and see that it consisted of a bunch of obscure minutia... I am not sure I would blame them for trying to find an easier way to pass the exam.
Personally, I don't bother much with certifications anymore because I just don't think they're worth the paper printed on in most cases. I personally wouldn't cheat on them in any case because I don't believe in cheating, but I see certifications as more of a marketing game than any indicator of actual knowledge. I prefer to spend my study time learning new technologies from a how-to, practical standpoint rather than memorizing minutia on the ones I already know well.
YMMV.
--
Anye Mercy
"Service Unavailable is not an Error" -- John, ENOM support
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." -- Inigo Montoya in "Princess Bride"
"Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice." -- Will Durant
August 25, 2008 at 8:21 am
What always gets me is that cheaters always know that they are not playing by the rules, so where is the self-satisfaction of a job well done supposed to come from? A trivial example is rigging a video game to make it easier to get a high score. The high score is meaningless, because it is not a measure of playing the actual game. This is not me on my moral high horse, just confusion about what is satisfying about it.
For less trivial things such as cheating that gains money or as a consequence costs someone else's life, of course, the motivation to rationalize the meaninglessness of the "victory" can be very high. That is where some people somehow find a way to sleep at night, though for the life of me I can't imagine how - unless they are biologically lacking a conscience mechanism.
webrunner
-------------------
A SQL query walks into a bar and sees two tables. He walks up to them and asks, "Can I join you?"
Ref.: http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2009/02/sql-joke.html
August 25, 2008 at 8:35 am
I have noticed that people have mentioned googling a problem or asking someone else at the office for help on an issue as cheating. I don't consider either cheating. I just googled using an SSIS Script Transform to add output rows because I had no idea how to do it and LEARNED how to do it. I already had the general idea, but I did not know the specifics. If I don't know how to do something I need to find out how and my resources are books, the internet, and co-workers. In my mind cheating in this case would be claiming to have done it all on my own and not crediting the resources I used.
BTW - the resource I used was this blog post by Matthew Roche: http://bi-polar23.blogspot.com/2008/06/splitting-delimited-column-in-ssis.html.
Jack Corbett
Consultant - Straight Path Solutions
Check out these links on how to get faster and more accurate answers:
Forum Etiquette: How to post data/code on a forum to get the best help
Need an Answer? Actually, No ... You Need a Question
August 25, 2008 at 8:37 am
webrunner (8/25/2008)
What always gets me is that cheaters always know that they are not playing by the rules, so where is the self-satisfaction of a job well done supposed to come from? webrunner
Last summer I read the book "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room". Great book, and a spell-binding read - but in the book you get a taste of what "collective cheating" is, and how so many young traders at Enron knew that what they were doing was wrong, but it was constantly being reinforced (and required!) by upper management so that "wrong became good business, and therefore 'right'".
At Enron, during their horrible heyday, cheating was considered "thinking outside the box" and "innovation", and many Enron traders got very rich on multi-million dollar bonuses by cheating the system, and the people. As well, traders who would not "bend the rules" (eg, cheat) were fired as "non-producers".
Webrunner makes a great point - but we have all lived through cheating scandals that have turned the rules AND results on their heads! At Enron, (and others?) cheating was a "good thing" and was handsomely rewarded.
Very scarey...
August 25, 2008 at 8:48 am
Bert (8/25/2008)
The reason for this phenomenon is that we live in an evil world. People are basically evil, not good. Bert
Bert - no one has taken you to task for this and no one should, for we are a population that wars against ourselves. It is often a dog fight to determine if we will do the right thing or not. And often if we have had no leadership or parental guidance as to what we should do, we make a poor decision.
Cheating, deception, and all the like behaviors will in time be found out. And it will follow you where you go. It is the poorer choice in life.
One of the other ideas I hear often is, 'It is not wrong if I do not get caught'. This also is way wrong since one of the most dangerous behaviors is to lie to yourself and believe it. That leads to a road no one wants to travel.
In short, I choose to do the right, and when I am corrected about some behavior I though was right and is not, I change that behavior.
No cheating, none of the time!
Miles...
Not all gray hairs are Dinosaurs!
August 25, 2008 at 8:49 am
I'll throw in my 2 cents on this. Cheating, per the dictionary used to look it up, is defined as:
To deceive by trickery; swindle.
To mislead; fool.
To act dishonestly; practice fraud.
To violate rules deliberately.
Let's use the the Question of the Day questions as an example. If I don't know the answer, is it cheating to google it or look it up in BOL?
Cheating is waiting until tomorrow to answer today's question so you can look up the answer in tomorrow's newsletter.
But if I honestly spend the time to do the research and put in an honest effort to find the answer, I don't think that is cheating.
Stopping cheating starts at home, teaching your children honesty and integrity, and that failure is NOT bad but steps to learning. Our prisons our full of people who wanted to take the "shortcuts"...
Scott
Viewing 15 posts - 16 through 30 (of 82 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply