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Comment by gardenhedge | Hacker News Reader

I grew up staunchly against cheating. Becoming an adult was hard. My whole university class cheated on a tough assignment - someone found the solution online and shared it around. I didn't look at it, took the challenge and gave it a lot of effort. I got a pretty bad mark and the rest of the class got top marks.

I also see the same mindset in work. People don't prepare for presentations and then spitball when presenting it. It's not "cheating" but it's skipping the effort and preparation in the same way.

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You can’t really cheat your way to a better presentation. If the “spitballed” version is good enough for the situation, why expend a lot of effort on preparation?

Maybe the problem is that people have low expectations when everyone delivers bad presentations. This kind of cultural thing is often easier to fix by changing the format rather than pushing for everyone to do more — in other words, ask “do we need all these presentations?” instead of “why do you all put so little effort in your presentations.”

If the presentation misrepresents a projects state through vagueness I might call that cheating.

It probably isn't good enough. But it's hard for the audience to tell.

"Any questions?"

"How are we going to scale the data storage?"

"Oh, we're confident that the data will all fit in a single SQLite instance."

"Great."

It's only six months later, when it turns out it won't, and there's a lot of stress and panicked re-working, that the lack of preparation will be obvious. And by then, everyone will have forgotten the presentation.

If all you need to answer that question is "we're confident that X" then that's still a problem with the asker. Why are they confident? Have we modeled the data needs over time? What data are we even storing? Basic probing questions should either uncover the lack of preparation or show that things will indeed be fine.

Just like cheating is a problem for a teacher to solve, a lack of preparation is a problem for the audience to solve.

This is only true in a low-trust society. In a high-trust society, it's absolutely on the presenter to make their claims not only true, but realistically true, and acceptable by the average person. When people defect from that norm, they are shamed, or worse.

Aren't we talking about an environment where there are rampant cheaters? My perception was that this is by definition a low-trust company. Of course, it is always going to be easier to remove yourself from that situation and go to a company that has more rigorous interviews that would catch cheating in the first place.

The corollary of your argument is that hiring rampant cheaters produces (by definition, as you say) a low-trust company. Putting aside everything else, low-trust organizations are intrinsically dysfunctional (though it may take a while for the consequences to play out.) In them, asking more questions will not get you useful information, and you had better watch your back.

See, for example, the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, Hoxha's Albania, the Taliban's Afghanistan...

This is less spitballed presentation and more spitballed design. The latter is much much much worse.

How is spitballing a presentation cheating? It's the equivalent of taking a test without studying, not presenting somebody else's work as your own.

It's a broken system where effort and performance isn't acknowledged and rewarded and the whole purpose of being there is undermined. At some point the whole enterprise is destructive and should be shut down.

If the outcome is successful with less effort how is that bad? I was just in a joint presentation with a new grad. We both had our parts. They spent hours preparing their parts of a technical demonstration. I just walked through my part of the demo and had an “open discussion”.

They put 4x more effort to achieve what I would say was a 20% better result. That’s not meant to be an insult to them, I have much more experience.

if the end result is the same who cares

When has "having been there" ever been a measure for reward? In college no one gave a shit if you came to lectures, all that mattered was the exam at the end of the semester. If you learn better with books: great!

I'm suprised that so many companies are unable to measure the performance of their employees in an effective manner. This entire discussion comes down to whether management actually wants to own the product and subsequently the product development lifecycle and is then also willing to investigate potential friction, or, as is much more often the case, doesn't really care and just wants to be told what they want to hear.

You prioritize a metric (keep management happy) over actualy results. If I can improve that metric by improvising, how am I a cheater?

>It's a broken system where effort and performance isn't acknowledged and rewarded and the whole purpose of being there is undermined. At some point the whole enterprise is destructive and should be shut down.

The point of presentation is usably not to put up great presentation, but to get certain points across.

If you successfully do that with quickly thrown presentation, then its waste of time spending more on it.

I'm sorry, but I disagree with the analogy. If you can spitball the presentation, your time is likely spent better elsewhere than preparing for the presentation.

I’m curious how far you are into your career. It sounds a bit like you are treating presentations as a performance, which is natural to fall into but I think it is a bit of a trap time investment wise. If you practice improvising presentations you will eventually get good at improvising presentations which is a valuable skill to have IMO.

What does spitball mean? I don’t prepare for presentations but I can’t tell how that would be cheating.

It means to extemporize / ramble.

But that’s not cheating on presenting, that’s just doing a bad job, no? That is, just visible incompetence?

It leads to the modern world where "influencers" and "fake news" succeed while creators and contributors fail. It's hard to see this being the basis of a sustainable society.

I don’t agree that those things are at all related to not preparing for work presentations

If you are a creator that can’t get your ideas across, you’re just like the literally dozen of people who have approached me with a “great idea” with no go to market strategy.

"If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?"

- No country for old men

We live in an era of transition. Deals and speed are more important than rigor.

When the easier money dries up, that will change.

Hadn't easy money dried up already ?

> I didn't look at it, took the challenge and gave it a lot of effort. I got a pretty bad mark and the rest of the class got top marks.

I am curious to know what conclusion you draw from the anecdote about the test?

Is it that you aren't good enough because you tried your best and failed?

Or is it that the test is a fallible instrument, designed by a human being who works within the constraints of an institution and has no choice but to treat education as if it is a magic juice that it's his job to squirt into the students heads and then administer tests to determine if the juice stuck there or leaked out, thereby identifying the defective and leaky craniums?

Or is it that you seemed out of touch with what every else intuitively understood? ie. That they're being evaluated and that a negative evaluation can have profound consequences for the rest of their life, regardless of if the testing procedure is fair or not?

It was a pretty tough assignment iirc. In my mind an assignments purpose is to learn - which I did from putting in the effort and then reviewing the solution after submitting.

You seem to be getting my point though - I would have rather failed than cheat.

I learned that people (even smart people - which my peers were) will cheat if its beneficial to them.

Ironic then that the real test was to see who has flexible thinking to adjust to a dynamic situation and who mindlessly follows misconstrued advice.

If you really wanted to challenge yourself there's nothing stopping you from doing extra excerises outside of class. Yes, your other classmates were wrong for cheating, but you're paying the university and they can't even be bothered to update the their tests because they don't care about the cheating or you getting an education either.

There's any number of situtations like this that happen in real life, from school, government, politics, work, etc. Not understanding these rules is much worse than being able to do some assignment in university.

Your comment reads as though you were saying that cheating on an assignment is “flexible thinking.” That’s quite a stretch.

he's thinking flexibly

While it's unlikely these test results were deliberately leaked as a 'real-world' learning exercise, the principle definitely applies.

I had a friend in college friend who was in a Government major program, which was notorious for handing out insanely large reading lists for each class, like literally a ~meter tall stack of books for a term. Being the highly conscientious person she was, she spent the first three years trying to get through it all. She was blown away her senior year when she found out that the professors did NOT expect every book to be read! The professors had worked at the highest levels of govt (including Cabinet level), and knew that the volume of available references in the real role was enormous, and that a key skill was being able to efficiently whittle them down to a usable level without reading every page. So, they were literally recreating the situation for their students. Her senior year went a lot better after learning that...

Why didn't they told them so, what a shitty professors

Good question, bad assessment.

I'm pretty sure it was because it is actually the same situation in the real world — you're EXPECTED to have full command of all that information, yet need to filter it down in real time. If you are told to just skim forever, you don't ever face the real-world problem, and fail when you get there.

EDIT typo

So rather than try to improve the situation by teaching them techniques for doing this winnowing and skimming, which would a) reduce the stress on their students (both in the class and in the real world), and b) increase the efficiency and productivity of the students once they were out there working, they instead chose to perpetuate the significantly more negative status quo.

That sounds like bad professors to me.

Yeah, it's sadly predictable that OP is seeing this play out in the workplace. People who cheat to get hired are also likely to scheme and manipulate their way up the corporate ladder. This happens at almost every company, every day.

Interestingly it doesn't have to be this way. This is mostly due to the fact that nearly all companies use a command-and-control management structure where people are promoted by the people above them. Stealing credit from your co-workers and/or convincing your manager that you're going to support them is a surefire way to climb the ladder.

The solution is simple: promote from below.

Basically, teams should be lead by people they have democratically chosen, and that process should continue all the way to the top. I've always found it curious that most of the world recognizes democracy as the most effective way to structure a government, but the corporate world is obsessed with dictatorial command-and-control structure - with predictable results.

Disclaimer: I am the co-founder of a co-op dev studio that was based on 18th century pirate charters (https://www.fountstudio.com/blog/yes-we-have-a-pirate-code-1...).

Dahl wrote about this (which you might already know): https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520058774/a-preface-to-econ...

When the rules of civilization change to the rules of the jungle, society collapses. Many societies have collapsed, even in modern times. It's not fun.

So when was the golden age of “society” where it was morally better?

When you import people from the jungle, you eventually become the jungle.

Cheating is a slippery slope.

This is the one thing that I always remind myself and my people, whenever the temptation arises.

If my cheating works, I could never stop myself from doing it again, bigger, causing much worse damage to me and people around me when I get caught.

If my cheating fails, I've lost more than what I could have gained anyway.

To me its a lose-lose. I'd rather get up and leave, or find another way than cheat.

And I hold that standard for people around me too. If I know they've cheated, even when I'm not involved or affected, that person or group and I are done.

Its a hard non-negotiable thing. And I think I'm better for it.

This is two totally different things. Not preparing for a presentation means you deliver a mediocre-to-bad presentation; you can't cheat by looking up the answer somewhere.

So if delivering a lousy presentation is good enough for whoever wanted the presentation, why go to the effort of making a great presentation? Are the rewards for that effort worth the expenditure? Probably not, which is why people are "spitballing" it.

What is the reward for putting in the presentation effort? If I get my salary if I spitball and I get my salary whether I put in effort, why bother?

I don't bother prepare for client support calls, mostly because I don't want to do them and want to be considered incompetent at them so I am not asked to help in the future as much. So at least for me, presentations are nothing but more work.

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