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Comment by anon946 | Hacker News Reader

As a professor, this completely resonates with me. For example, I take attendance and make it 5% of the grade. Then I give 5 free days and am generous with absences due to whatever. Why? Because it's a nudge for many students to get them to come to class, which makes them stay engaged, and ultimately get a better grade.

(The other reason I take attendance is so that I can recognize at least most of them by mid-semester, so can call on them by name when they raise their hand.)

And I'm often torn with taking points off for submitting work late. On one hand, why should it matter exactly when they submitted the work, if it's good work? On the other hand, I know that if I just said that there's no late penalty, some significant fraction of the students would wait till the end of the semester, then realize that they haven't been keeping up, then create headaches for everyone involved, including themselves.

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I ran my class like a job (senior level interactive media). We had assignments with deadlines and I did PR reviews.

Deadlines are deadlines. Cut scope, features, etc but absolutely no late work.

You can guess how it went.

> I ran my class like a job... Deadlines are deadlines.

We were having a conversation at my college about deadlines at some training thing and someone pointed out that almost no job is like that. That movie scenario where the guy has a big presentation, but it's also his daughter's dressage recital or whatever, and if he misses the presentation he'll lose his job? That doesn't happen. In the real world, you just say "I can't do it that day, let's reschedule for next week." and that's fine. Most real world deadlines are soft.

As a software engineer, I generally agree.

My partner is a corporate lawyer, though, and deadlines are a _big deal_ for them.

>That movie scenario where the guy has a big presentation, but it's also his daughter's dressage recital or whatever, and if he misses the presentation he'll lose his job? That doesn't happen.

Sure it does. If you are scheduled to present to a major client you can't easily reschedule for next week. Especially if it's presenting something that will have impact. Now you probably won't lose your job if you tell your team why you can't make it and it's legit but frankly you may if you no-show.

Rocket launches, if you're a rideshare are not soft deadlines. You don't get your payload delivered on time, you lose. Even if you're the only payload, you have hard deadlines - there may be a few windows to launch in but if you miss those the next opportunity might not be for another 26 months. Someone will lose their job over that.

They are soft deadlines, launches are routinely delayed due to unforseen circumstances, such as weather.

A weather delay does not mean you get more time to get your payload onboard.

Definitely depends on your deliverables. My recent deliverables were campaigns for CES and Superbowl. I can't say lets schedule for next week for those. On the other hand, I think if I screwed up I won't get fired, either...maybe someone up the management chain :)

You are not wrong but it was a class agreement upfront and I, of course, am human as well and gave TONs of extensions.

They didn't like it, though. And unlike CS courses (this was in a media dept) none of the homework was very hard or required more than a few hours of effort.

A nice compromise that I've appreciated in the classes that I've taken - have strict deadlines, but offer X days (say, 2) of a no-questions-asked extension. It creates the clear expectation that work be turned in on time, but offers a small relief valve for one-off problems.

The problem is that this adds extra bookkeeping for a professor who's already busy with everything else going on, which gets back to the original poster's point of becoming everything that they hated.

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