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Comment by jdkaim | Hacker News Reader

Update: I immediately took down my class project site after receiving yesterday’s ultimatum. I still don’t think the simple demo site violated the letter or spirit of the registration rules, but I took it down because I always want to operate in good faith.

They followed up today to thank me for doing it, but also indicated that they were putting a hold on my account anyway. As a result, I am not going to be able to register for my final quarter and have been de facto expelled at the end of this quarter.

Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.

I really love UW and have had a wonderful time here. But this is so demoralizing.

Update #2:

I appreciate you guys for all of your advice.

This platform was never intended to be monetized, and I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.

I'm not planning to pursue this project at this point. If they came up to me at first with the offer to work with them it might be different, but the way they handled it makes me just want to walk away.

View on HN

> I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.

All evidence so far indicates they will not make it right, but instead they may make it even worse. Your faith is wildly misplaced. Seriously, talk to a lawyer.

Keep in mind, just because you seek advice from a lawyer doesn't mean you need to take legal action against the school. Talking to a lawyer is not an escalation; the school doesn't even need to know you consulted one. A lawyer will advise whether you should take legal action and any more amicable alternatives available before they do anything on your behalf.

OP please consider listening to this reply. Do not rely on an unaccountable bureaucracy to "do the right thing." They don't.

At least he'll learn this valuable lesson pretty young. It was fairly devastating to me by the time I learned it well into my 30's.

Having seen what some other university administrations have done to darling students and innovators even just around such things as lab space, parent comment is right on the money.

Just piling on here because upvotes are not visible. The one thing you can guarantee is that your good faith is not reciprocated by the university. Get a lawyer.

To make it easier: it sounds like you're still registered. University of Washington offers Student Legal Services ( https://depts.washington.edu/slsuw/ ). Set up a referral with one of them and talk to them. Even if they're employees of the university and don't want to work with you to sue the university itself they may be able to give you good advice about how to proceed.

It’s a funny thought, but looks like a nonstarter:

> SLS cannot represent a student when the opposing party is another UW-Seattle, Tacoma, or Bothell student or UW entity.

They can have a conversation without being representation and should connect OP to someone who can represent them.

No they can't have a conversation when they know of a non waivable conflict.

Surely they could refer the enquiry to the bar association or something in this jurisdiction.

How would the lawyer even know, without conversation, that there was a conflict?

> Surely they could refer the enquiry to the bar association or something in this jurisdiction.

They might but in many cases wouldn't even do that because they still wouldn't get paid for it. Doesn't matter, you don't need them for that.

To be fair, in many cases, they can be held responsible for whether you refer people to the right place.

They can basically say "i can't speak to you". More than even that is tricky.

As for the latter, that's why i said "when they know of a non waivable conflict".

Emphasis being "know of".

Here, they know they have a conflict - they have a client, it's not this person, and they know their client will be adversarial to this person. They aren't even part of a law firm that represents multiple clients regularly or something like that where sometimes the conflicts might be waivable (often not, but still)

This is a very very easy case.

If they don't know they have a conflict, sure, they can have a conversation for the purposes of understanding if they have a conflict.

That's not this case though!

An example of the difference between being independent vs third party.

Who mostly pays them sets the rules.

The entity paying the lawyers isn’t making the rules here. This is professional ethics: the attorneys in question have a conflict of interest.

It’s subtler than conflict of interest.

Anyone working for students while being paid for by the university (like some ombudsman) might think twice before going too hard after anything in the institution side that they work at, with people, etc.

This isn’t to say it should be adversarial, just not endlessly borne back against the currents into being neutralized by bureaucracy and office politics.

If it was independently funded..

You describe why this is a nonwaivable conflict of interest.

Precisely

I know very little about lawyering, but I could imagine a UW-alum or Seattle-area lawyer advising pro bono bc of generosity or good publicity on a very newsworthy case

Anyone on here friends with a UW-alum or Seattle-area lawyer who might be interested but doesn’t read HN?

Do American university students belong to unions?

It's very common in the UK. The most visible part of the unions is running social activities, often bars and events, but they can also provide legal advice to their members.

Graduate students (who teach, do research, and some administrative tasks for the university) occasionally do. What American schools usually have is a “student government” which is approximately 90% roleplaying as elected officials, and the remaining 10% is deciding which banquets they should host themselves to spend the small budget the university gives them.

Not undergraduates. The "student union" in this context is 100% a social entity.

Graduate students sometimes are part of unions, but usually only if they're also employed by the university (somebody paying full tuition for an MBA probably isn't in a union, but a doctoral student teaching or doing research might be).

Undergrads doing part-time work at the university to pay bills (dining hall, bookstore, etc) could be, in theory, but probably aren't.

Even if this student isn't a member, the local graduate student union (https://www.uaw4121.org/) would probably be a useful ally. All TAs are in the bargaining unit, and UW CSE has _a lot_ of undergrad TAs, so I wouldn't even be surprised if this student is a present (or former) member.

Upvoting too.

> Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.

Wow. Literally blackmailing a student to do illegal work (at least would be categorized like that in my country). A student that already paid money for class and potentially a degree the univ is trying to block, mind blowing. OP, 1000% lawyer up.

Relying on good faith won't help you at all.

Someone at the uni has taken this personally, and has attacked you. At this point, if you don't defend yourself - that person has won.

Please seek legal advice.

Their response on face value doesn't make sense. But if I had to guess, you inadvertently made someone in the registrar's office look bad. They probably had to answer to "why didn't you think of this?" If that is the case then it makes a lot more sense and is retaliatory behavior. You can't undo their insecurity and loss of face. Therefore you should not expect a reasonable response.

Act accordingly.

Educate yourself on your options. This is why people are recommending a consultation with a lawyer.

Reach out to your friends and contacts in the University. Leverage existing ones to make new ones. Others may be in a stronger position to put pressure on the registrar's office.

Use the news and media to further ratchet up pressure.

Stay positive. Fon't stoop to their level, it won't help you.

And if you have to walk away it won't hurt you too much in the long term. After about 5 years in industry nearly all companies stop caring about credentials. Just get your foot in the door somewhere and shine, that's what I did and it worked out for me 26 years later.

Hang in there.

Seconding this. It's entirely likely the registrar is this petty and boneheaded. It's less likely that their boss is though, this is a really bad look for the university.

Personally I would find a way to contact the president of the university (possibly through university PR, who also care about public image) and simply state,

"The registrar is asking me for quid pro quo, that I develop software for them in exchange to restore my ability to register for classes."

and include a screenshot of that communication.

Additionally, consider "agreeing" to their demands, if they will unblock you immediately. Register for classes, then reneg on your half of the "deal". Even if they then retaliate, that strengthens your position (a) that they are engaging in quid pro quo, and (b) that there's no valid reason that you should be barred from registering for courses, and also buys you some time.

A +1 to everyone else who has said get a lawyer.

I'll add another angle: financial.

You have invested years of time and presumably thousands of dollars into your schooling. Their threat that they will not allow you to graduate unless you give them unpaid labor without a clear boundary condition is a threat. While I haven't seen the correspondence, from what you said it appears they're doing the moral equivalent of one of those sitcom situations where someone is compelled to do what the other person wants under a threat, and even when they've done it, the threatening person keeps the threat.

A good lawyer (and not all lawyers are good) will help you understand your rights and your position.

As others have said, this is not an escalation of aggression, and not only don't you have to tell them whether you've seen a lawyer, unless the lawyer is speaking on your behalf- you don't have to tell them anything, and you shouldn't tell them, or tell us (in case they read this, which they likely will).

A lawyer in this case is more of a scholarly resource, telling you what your options are.

Agreed.

To add to that: it is understandable to expect and hope for the other party to behave rationally. But there is a power imbalance that the other party is exploiting and for all we know intends to continue.

> reneg on your half of the "deal".

deny, delay, defect.

and don't sign anything!!

> and don't sign anything!!

This. If asked to sign anything, say that you have to check with your attorney first.

> But if I had to guess, you inadvertently made someone in the registrar's office look bad. They probably had to answer to "why didn't you think of this?

That was my initial thought too. The upside is that that "someone" likely has a boss who called them out - so there may well be levels of the hierarchy that won't lose face by backing out of the exclusion decision. The challenge is to get their attention.

The problem is that their leadership may not care. Bureaucrats at higher education don't take the job because they're good at it. They take it because they're not and want a job with high job security. The poor pay and unrewarding tasks are acceptable to them as a means to coast. Couple that with a job that can be quite stressful at times, students can be very demanding, and you have a recipe for entrenched apathy. I base my assessment on my time working for a University for 8 years.

The registrar's office are the wrong people to appeal to. The deans office can fix this, but they may only move if it makes the University look bad. That's where the news and media can help, but this guy likely needs help to make that happen effectively.

Yeah, let me give some perspective here.

There's somebody in the registrar's office whose job is to be responsible for the production process of registration. They are minimally staffed and given just enough resources to run that process. Likely at some point their leadership told them they had to make an API so that they could integrate with other systems. Due to poor funding and lack of skills, just doing that is a full time/major job.

Then some student comes along and says "hey look if I scrape this API, I can make an app that helps users! That's what APIs are for, right!?" The student is likely quite smart and probably built something that is useful.

But students aren't full time software engineers. They lack knowledge and context about how to build production systems that handle the load during the registration crush and also don't cause undue load on the backend API servers.

So when the dean comes to the head of IT for Registration, and says "wait, this student just did something that you were supposed to do, and it looked really easy", you just made the IT person's life much harder but didn't actually necessarily solve the problem. Now the IT person has to defend what they have done, while looking bad... and is not getting any further resources to fix the issue.

I think this is a variant of the "why don't you just..." and chesterton's fence. That is, if you're inexperienced, it's often easy to come up with a naive solution without understanding the context, that kind of works but that actually makes things overall worse. For example, what if your app crashed the registration backends during the middle of registration. Are you, the clever student, on call during registration (24/7) for your app, and in contact with the folks who run the registration backends?

It's easy to criticize the IT folks at Colleges but they are not resourced to handle things like this.

It's really noteworthy that other students have the opportunity to engage in this and other projects as part of their curriculum. They can gain valuable experience while also contributing to the college community. It's disheartening that this situation has led to such drastic measures, impacting students' futures. It seems like there could have been more thoughtful ways to address this on the college's part.

I am not sure I consider the university's production registration system as a useful project for students to contribute to. Those are systems that are the responsbility of the university administration, not the educational mission of the university.

Yes, the university was drastic; if I were the person responsible, I wouldn't have started with a terms of service violation and putting registration on hold; I'd write a nice thank you note with some encouragement, along with a direct request to hold off running the application until the next registration season, and a calendar entry to discuss this in person/off the written record to explain the more subtle aspects associated with developing production applications in a university environment.

> They lack knowledge and context about how to build production systems that handle the load during the registration crush and also don't cause undue load on the backend API servers.

That sounds like a cop-out. Sure, students may not know about all this, but they're also not building Google. Many people run businesses without caring about such things just fine. Most things don't require six nines of reliability and people don't expect them to be this reliable. Students in particular are used to university systems being constantly down, or resource-starved to the point of uselessness for no good reason.

> it's often easy to come up with a naive solution without understanding the context, that kind of works but that actually makes things overall worse. For example, what if your app crashed the registration backends during the middle of registration. Are you, the clever student, on call during registration (24/7) for your app, and in contact with the folks who run the registration backends?

It's hard to come up with a solution that's worse than what you get at universities for this stuff, which usually is nothing at all - and even if it is something, there's no one on call to help the student anyway.

Yes, but as we know, the best way to make a project that is late/slow/unreliable even later, slower, and more unreliable is to add inexperienced devs to the project. Which is (from the perspective of the university) what they are trying to avoid.

well except they allegedly asked said allegedly inexperienced developer to develop the thing for them, for free

Yes, I think this post has established that whomever created the response to the original ToS violation (rather, just a plan to violate the ToS) wasn't being very thoughtful (assuming everything is being described correctly). I would assume that at this point, the discussion has been moved above the original employee who responded and is being dealt with at the dean level (with the goal to be avoiding UW appearing in a bad light in the press).

I've seen hundreds of "administration outrage" articles and I guess I've kind of learned that the backstory is usually more complicated, nuanced, and reasonable than the original poster implied. But the internet mobs proceed anyway.

I got their code to run and it's not good. It's unusable as is and could be created from scratch in a better way in a day. It lacks all integrations with the University API, that part was never written.

The existing matching of swap requests is poorly done and requires much further work.

There's nothing of value here that OP had to scuttle.

You write as if you've had some experience .... Still, the IT team should have reached out to the student - it's a university and they especially should be good and dealing with inexperienced, well-meaning students - and straightened it out: Hey, this is a great idea; it will also need this and this and something like this to work with these other systems and handle the load on registration day.

> Yeah, let me give some perspective here.

This is spot on and way more likely than my contrived example. The point holds this is political as all things are in University environments.

Another interesting observation I made from my time working at a University is that it was one of the most toxic and political work environments I've ever had the displeasure to work in.

APIs are not scraped. Web sites are scraped. APIs are simply used.

> And if you have to walk away it won't hurt you too much in the long term. After about 5 years in industry nearly all companies stop caring about credentials.

That is very wrong, in my experience. Many jobs require college degrees; much status in life requires college degrees. I know people who are smart, successful, and eternally embarrassed when that comes up.

Also, you did the work, you deserve the degree - a college education is a real, valuable thing. Don't let the current anti-intellectual, anti-institutional, anti-liberal trendiness distract you. The trends pass, and decades from now you'll still have a degree and the truths of knowledge will remain.

> That is very wrong, in my experience

It's right in my experience, but I'm also aware that its 2025, not 2007 when I got away with this.

Certainly jobs will say they require a college degree.

I have three and a half years of a five year degree in computer engineering. My current job as a VP of Engineering "requires" a degree. The language in the job description is very clear.

Guess what? That's always negotiable with enough experience.

If you can talk intelligently about your subject matter in depth and you can demonstrate a history of that, then you're fine.

A degree doesn't magically make you a gifted programmer. It merely shows you where to start. You still need a lifetime of self guided continual education to be really successful in your career.

I think where it hurt me most was early in my career where I likely earned less than I would have with a degree.

This will likely become harder to do with time as computer science and hardware slow their ever changing advancement and become more established.

By all means get the degree if you can. But you can still over come not having one with enough self study and being strategic about which jobs you take.

You are an anecodotal example, and no matter what is generally true about the IT industry, we can always find anecdotal counterexamples on HN because there are so many IT people here.

Many places won't look at you or will downgrade your application without a college degree, and data shows earnings are clearly less (as you say).

I'm truly glad things are going well for you. It's not the only thing in life, but if someone is a quarter away from getting one they'd be crazy to walk away.

Also worth noting that it would be incredibly naive to expect good faith to be reciprocated by any institution at all throughout the course of one's life, which sounds cynical, but lets be real. If there's a way that almost any institution or person that you're transacting with in good faith—including schools, workplaces, lawyers, medical professionals, the leader of your country, sometimes family, whatever—can get away with fucking you over, they might. Not always, but expect it. Which reminds me, I need to pester a doctor about a web design invoice.

> If there's a way that almost any institution or person that you're transacting with in good faith [...] can get away with fucking you over, they might. Not always, but expect it.

This. Always protect yourself, even when operating in good faith. You may only interact with someone professionally, but you never know what kind of person you are really working with. Sometimes people may seem nice, but are pure evil.

In this particular case, it is likely the people in charge are completely unaware of the people doing the blackmailing. This may even be criminal, so it might be worth just talking to the police.

Yep, they'll walk all over whoever they can, until they receive just enough bad publicity or pushback, and suddenly it's not an issue anymore.

> You may only interact with someone professionally, but you never know what kind of person you are really working with. Sometimes people may seem nice, but are pure evil.

It's not even always a case of being evil. Large institutions/companies are full of polices and processes designed to protect the system at all costs and some nice people will turn their brain off and strictly follow those policies either because they feel they have to, because it's the easiest thing to do, or because they know that as long as they stick to the policies (or what they think the policies are) they'll be safe.

Absolutely. It's my impression—after many mistakes—that one of the most important pieces of advice I could have given myself at a younger age, is that "your job is basically a function of what you're empowered to do and what you're clearly rewarded for, don't imagine it to be something it's not, don't pretend or act as though you have more influence than you do".

Your bank's website might have shit accessibility and usability, but it's not because the developers suck, it's because they aren't paid to do more than the minimum that they're paid for, and it's stupid for them to incur that cost or scope risk just because they're altruistic. If they spent 5 hours on a Wednesday optimizing a thing for screen readers, but there's literally no measurable reason to do so, that's a mark against them if there's anything else to do that does.

The same pattern is true across other jobs. It's not the admin's job to have empathy or to decide whether a policy should exist, it's there job to enforce arbitrary policies. It's also not the job of a University to educate people, that's now a University typically makes money, it's only even tenuously their job to get people between having no measure of knowledge, and having a measure of knowledge, but not necessarily to have any specific impact on that.

To add to that, always know your rights and responsibilities. Don't let anyone walk on your rights and make sure you do at least what you are supposed to do. From moving to a different country, people will prey on you so fast if they realize you don't know your rights (rental rights are soooo much different here than in the US, for example, and they will literally prey on your fear of being evicted). In essence, knowing what you CAN do and MUST do can make all the difference in the world.

Student legal services usually can't help you with disputes with the uni -- I remember reading this when speaking to them about a (unfair IMO) traffic ticket when I was a student at a different institution.

Joining the dogpile to get a lawyer. Your degree is at stake, and this isn't the sort of issue that will burn up your money if you don't want it to. Go in for a consultation and see what they think. Bring all correspondence. Worst case scenario you pay him for a few hours after he has some answers for you.

An attorney kept me from making some very expensive (honest) mistakes and payed for himself many times over. Don't gamble with your future.

cosign, this story is outrageous, it is Lawyer Time, Now. The university is completely out of line and this has all the makings of a disastrous outcome the way they are operating

> University of Washington offers Student Legal Services ( https://depts.washington.edu/slsuw/ ).

Do not talk to them. They report to the same people who are persecuting you. Find another attorney - ask someone local for references, maybe a student from the area could ask their parents.

Get a lawyer. Holding your degree hostage unless you work for them for free is off the charts ridiculous. They might have just paid for your entire education.

When I went to the UW I used Arexx and my 2400 baud modem to turbo register for classes the moment the system went live.

> Arexx and my 2400 baud modem

Arexx was fun back in the day. A nice scripting language for the time.

Not to mention that University of Washington is a public university run by the state. IANAL but this may well fall into constitutional issues so the ACLU might be interested, not to mention any number of other pro-bono lawyers. Most attorneys I’ve interacted with give a free one hour consultation and this sounds like a rather clear case where they can at least refer the OP to someone in their network who might be interested in doing it for free (again IANAL).

Negative feedback can be a net good for anyone, even if they don't like it in the moment, and even for conglomerate entities like a school. Petty bureaucratic admins abusing their authority to spite you are likely abusing it against others under their purview. Honestly if you feel you have an allegiance to the school there's an argument that it's your duty to oppose petty tyrants within it. Think of it as a service to the the ideal of the school.

Agreed. You need a lawyer. Not necessarily to go to court, but at least to write some letters. That should not cost more than a few hundred dollars. Don't wait.

Document everything. Make copies. Store them somewhere safe.

Read Washington State law on extortion in the first degree.[1] Follow the link to the definition of "threat", especially the section on "official action": "To take wrongful action as an official against anyone or anything, or wrongfully withhold official action, or cause such action or withholding". It's really bad for a state official to attempt extortion. It's a 10 years in prison felony offense.

Edit: Having a lawyer write and send a letter on your behalf tends to resolve a large number of annoying situations. A lawyer on the other side will have to read it. This immediately gets you past the first-line people to people who have to consider consequences.

[1] https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=9A.56.120

Also, merely them knowing you have a lawyer instantly reframes the problem in their eyes. The path of least resistance to dealing with a "problematic" student is making the student go away. The path of least resistance to dealing with a "problematic" student with a lawyer is making the lawyer go away.

All of a sudden bureaucrats will be getting visits from internal legal departments asking very pointed questions about questionable actions.

Yes and.

Yes, and even if it doesn't go to court, the university will know that it will cost them time and money.

It's entirely possible that university president or higher administration is unaware of the situation, and if they were, will intervene. The best way to do that is to have it brought to their attention via a legal letter, which then means they need to bring in their lawyers.

A good lawyer for the university won't want to fight because fighting is not in the best interest of the university. A good lawyer will say "We threatened the student with this? No good can come of that... let him register, let him graduate and make this all go away."

That doesn't mean the client (the university) will take it, but overall fighting isn't in their interest either.

Unlike most of the other commenters I have personal experience fighting a college administration in court. It was a massive time waste and I came out losing a years of my academic career where they lost nothing (money is absolutely not a factor for a large university, nor is stalling court proceedings to waste your life). I'm not even allowed to elaborate deeply on what it was about, the settlement for putting it behind me was a binding NDA.

This isn't advice it's just a story about what happened to me, to give you an idea of how things *could* go for you:

What I did to warrant initial sanctioning by my college was filing a witness statement describing a petty disorderly offense another student did. Apparently the college didn't like that I filed a statement with the police and it did not go through their internal system. The school placed a hold and I contacted my dean by email. I was told by the dean, in writing, that I was not being sanctioned but the hold would remain until I attended a hearing to describe the incident as prescribed in the handbook. When I went to this 'procedural hearing' with the other witness, they brought us in one at a time in front of representatives of the student body and the administration. At the end of my account they told me I would receive their decision and sanctions by mail. They issued formal academic sanctions and created a remediation plan not unlike what they are requesting of you.

I retained a lawyer at this point and ended up filing a complaint in civil. There's nothing speedy here, judges stalled, the school stalled. Almost 2 years went by and we finally had the lawyers draft a settlement that made it possible to pursue college again. In the meanwhile they increased the sanctions on the remaining witness that didn't sue in order to retaliate. The student we filed the statement about, apparently the school couldn't touch since the police charged him. He got off paying a ticket and no other sanctions, last I heard he was in postgrad for mathematics and doing well for himself.

I didn't have it quite as bad as you, but I did go to war once with my alma mater regarding a particularly small lab director and part-time instructor who had a Napoleon complex going on. He was directly and obviously infringing on student's First Amendment rights, not to mention bullying the class as a whole and attempting to threaten people. Ironically, his heart was in the right place, but his execution was way off.

I was fortunate in that I went to college much later in life, after a career in the military, and as I'd had enough bullshit there, I made the conscious choice not to tolerate any out in the world.

Long story short, he and I butt heads. Then he wanted to take up to the Department head. For someone with a Ph.D., she definitely didn't think it through, just proving you can have a Ph.D., even in a STEM field, and not be too fucking bright... but... when it got to the Dean of Students, and the campus's VA liaison all sat down for a meeting with me, and I started pointing out that F.I.R.E. would have a field day with this, and would we really want a veteran-led incident on campus with a lab director that's flat out admitted in recorded interviews (I was attending college in a one-party recording state, so I had recordings of every one of these meetings) that he doesn't care about students' First Amendment rights??

That put everything into perspective really damn quick. I have never forgot that meeting because there, in that moment, we all looked at each other and everyone understood exactly what I was saying. The Dean of Students stood up and said, "Do you want to apologize to the department dean...?" and I just raised one eyebrow and he immediately shot back, "Right... we should probably all let this go." I nodded and said, "I think that'd be the best option for everyone involved, after you guys sit down with Lab Director and straighten him out."

I've done some things I'm not too particularly proud of in my life, but this was one time I really felt like I did the right thing.

The First Amendement limits what the US Congress/government can do, not what a private person can do.

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

If parent went to a state school, that is the government. If he went to a private school, FIRE goes after them for violating their own contracts that often mirror 1A language.

That's a wild oversimplification, it of course applies to state and local governments as well and has for a long time. A public university is a state entity.

If your college or university accepts money from the government, in public spaces on that campus, like say... anywhere outdoors, for instance, out on the quad, where this happened, that is considered a protected area for speech.

Please familiarize yourself with the various ways higher education comes under the umbrella of “state actor.”

Funnily enough, today I am I am (re)starting my post secondary education after a decade and counting in the military.

Your comment reminds me of one of the misconceptions that friends have of me/military. I am not as it happens a particularly good shot/fighter/camper/adventurer. However the military has more then prepared me to wade through a bureaucratic swamp to tell a room full of people paid more then me that they're wrong and will fight to the proverbial death over it.

That being said, other then some culture shock, not expecting anything too dramatic, ought to be a good time really.

I'm always curious in cases like these what the actual exercise of your "first amendment rights" was that the other person took offense to.

Made fun of a post-doc lab instructor that was under the lab director's purview.

I shit you not. He got upset that someone was - verbally - making fun of this guy. He was a goofy as fuck guy, so I see why 18-22 year olds would do that. I wouldn't because he was a good guy with a good heart, he just looked goofy, acted goofy, and plain old WAS goofy, but that's not enough for me to make fun of someone.

It is enough, actually, but I would never do it maliciously, and I would always do it to someone's face, and it would always... always be good-natured, not intentionally cruel.

That's a mafia with extra steps

Welcome to the US justice system

Thanks for speaking up. The internet talks about getting a lawyer like it’s a magic (and free) button you press to resolve a situation.

It’s not, and in some cases it can turn your problem into a more expensive and protracted different problem if you’re not careful.

I’d be especially cautious around a University that has already proven itself to have bureaucratic people who will turn small issues into threats of expulsion. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have legal counsel who is equally overstaffed and itching for something to do.

It is usually free and kind of magical to talk to a lawyer, though.

"You can beat the rap, but not the ride".

I am still dealing with a case with a 3 letter agency, going on 6 years now. "Bureaucratic violence" is a thing.

Wow this sounds like extortion to me.. I mean not just from the school, but also in the court system. I don't really understand Academia much or if this would effect a person attending another collage, but with something like this, I would drop out of college entirely and take the self-teaching route or online education. I'm not going to allow myself to be subjected to an abusive educational and court system.

Unlike most of hte other commentators I also have personal experience fighting a college administration -- and winning. By threatening lawyers, too.

I got into an Honors Study Abroad thing through the school, but was worried about an incomplete grade screwing up my GPA or causing issues. Emailed the admin about it + study abroad office -- they said all good, it's kosher.

Turns out it wasn't, and after dropping 41k to lock in housing and study abroad they told me I couldn't go because I couldn't transfer credits. Well here is a lesson in "keep your emails" cuz I dug that out and picked a fight with the administration.

They eventually gave me all of my money back minus the $600 non-refundable deposit. I was ready to go to the mat for that, too, but they offered to get me a guaranteed slot for on campus housing and permanent first crack at class selection similar to athletes and disabled students. I was sick of commuting by that point and took the offer. I figured out it was a way to get more money out of me pretty quickly -- solve an issue and make money via housing -- but my RA in the on-campus apartments was super cool and basically let me and a roommate squat for multiple summers. Still friends with a lot of those folks I met living on campus too.

Worked out okay, all things considered. Lawyers won't be a guaranteed win, but don't assume that just giving up is a better deal.

A lawyer is NOT the right next step. As soon as you engage a lawyer the school will switch from treating this as a student policy matter (which will be resolved in a timeline of days) to a legal matter (which will only be resolved in a timeline of years). The timeline question is of no concern to the courts or the school but makes a huge difference to you.

It does seem like you need someone on your side. A list of people to consider: your academic advisor, the professor in whose course you built the prototype application, your department chair, student ombudsman, dean of students. If the university is being as unreasonable as your posting makes it sound like, you will have no trouble getting one or more of these people on your side and they will be able to apply pressure to the registrars office on your behalf if needed to get your hold lifted.

This is the right answer. A large institution like a university is not a monolith. The university will produce antibodies to external participants, like lawyers (or the media). You're most likely to get better outcomes if you can ensure the conflict plays out within the university and its rules, structures, and participants. Your work now is to convince other members of the university to advocate on your behalf. (It should not be difficult. If this is as you describe, reasonable faculty members will be your allies.)

The same goes for publicizing this further. The student newspaper is probably okay, but keep talking to other media in the room as a bargaining chip. Bad press may well force some administrator's hand.

To be sure, a chat with a lawyer may be helpful to get a sense of the universe of possible outcomes pursuing extramural action, but don't let anbyody send any lawyerly letters yet.

> You're most likely to get better outcomes if you can ensure the conflict plays out within the university and its rules, structures, and participants.

It's too late for that, even if you're correct here (and I don't think I agree). News of this has already spread, and will continue to spread.

Having been on both sides of the fence here, this is highly contrary to my experience. Large institutions are more than happy, in many cases, to bully anybody when it benefits them. But as soon as possible legal/media issues emerge they're going to suddenly be your best friend looking to make things right as quickly and cleanly as possible.

The ombudsman is definitely not a bad idea, but in most cases the mere hint of legal involvement would get this resolved without any legal involvement - just going on for a consultation doesn't mean one has to go to the next step, and in all probability you won't have to.

Hard disagree. It doesn't harm to try to solve it with the help of a trusted intermediary. One doesn't lose anything but a bit of time. Instead it shows good faith. You can always escalate to the lawyer afterwards.

If they're attempting to extort him, then it's a legal matter whether or not he sees it that way.

You can consult a lawyer without having the lawyer engage with the university, and without the unviversity even knowing that you did.

Instead of taking your advice on the matter, maybe see what the lawyer has to say.

^ This.

You need a trusted advisor on your side who can look at it with a calm mind and perspective on what is normal, acceptable, and legal. You're young and have been slapped around, seemingly inappropriately.

If you were in physical pain, you'd talk to a doctor to assess and get recommendations before treatment. Do the same here.

Trusted advisor doesn't need to be lawyer. Can be trusted professor.

No, you need someone who will represent YOUR interests both in public and private.

When the stakes are exceptionally high, don't ask for advice from someone paid by the agressor.

And additionally a lawyer will help make him aware of alternatives he may not know about, and also give him warning as to what other strong arm tactics UW could do, and how to safeguard himself. It's truly a smart idea.

Also upvoting, as this is a valuable lesson as you head into a career: no company (nor school) cares about you more than they care about the organization. HR does not work for you and while the individuals may care for you personally, they will almost never act in "good faith".

Just another case of a business gradually feeling little respect for their customers.

If you had managed to build this system during my time at UW, I know for a fact that I and dozens of other students would have happily paid hundreds of dollars to use your project. The class and reservation system there was (and presumably is?) incredibly broken.

I remember literally the only way to get a spot reserved in some /mandatory/ courses was to find an upper classman with prioritized registration dates and a free schedule to hold the class for you. In you're in a frat, great. If you're a bit of an introvert that lives off campus, you're shit out of luck.

I imagine UW is fully aware of this, I cant believe that it's still so much an issue that they felt the jeed to expell you for even having the gall to demo an idea. Absolutely appalling

> I know for a fact that I and dozens of other students would have happily paid hundreds of dollars to use your project

Is this normal in the US, that students have high enough disposable income that they would be able to pay "hundreds of dollars" to use a webapp to swap classes with each other? Or is this school uniquely one for the more well-off kids out there?

Remembering my time when my friends were in university, some while working, just about no one would have hundreds of dollars to spend on something like that.

My sister-in-law is going back for her masters right now. She did the maximum allowed loans from her FAFSA, so after her tuition and fees were paid, she had enough left over to draw a $300/wk "salary" from the remaining balance. She has to pay her rent and groceries and other bills from that, but she usually has about $100 a month left over for "fun" - if she lived in a cheaper apartment or took out additional loans, she'd have a lot "left over," and this is what a lot of Americans do.

Wait, why would anyone do this, though? It’s like taking a personal loan from the government that is non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. The interest is going to accrue every year you go to uni.

If you use that to go long on the stock market, I get it since the S&P500 beats interest rates right now, though there’s a risk. Using it on personal expenses seems like the lowest EV choice!

Living expenses have to come from somewhere. If you use the time to graduate faster, instead of working to generate weekly income, in some cases you can come out ahead overall. Details vary, but it's not obvious that it's a bad deal.

Essential expenses it certainly makes sense. But it seems some amount of it is treated as disposable income rather than liability.

Based on the breakdown, it sounds like she has $100 leftover per month. That pretty much sounds like "liability" money to me. Barely much to dispose of.

The average student loan debt is $38k. If you borrow $100 extra per month, and defer your first payment till the month you graduate, your extra burden is $5300 or so or about 14%. The average borrower takes 20 years to pay off the debt. They’d pay it off 2 years earlier without this extra expenditure.

Okay, but this isn't a 4 year university loan. It's a masters program after she went back to school.

Someone pursuing a masters is much more likely to have a plan on how to turn that degree into better career progression or other opportunities. Especially a masters student who spent time in industry.

And honestly 5k loans to pay off 2-4 years later is about as good a loan debt as you're going to get. Paying off thst debt is more about having a career plan by that time than penny pinching for as low as loan value as possible.

Some required courses are only taught in Spring or only in Fall. Some of those "Fall only" courses are prerequisites for other required Spring-only courses.

If you can't get into a required course, it can delay your graduation a full year. That costs way more than a couple hundred dollars.

I ended up needing to stay an extra semester for a single course my final semester, because I planned poorly and discovered too late that I couldn't get it in my would-have-been-penultimate semester.

> If you can't get into a required course, it can delay your graduation a full year. That costs way more than a couple hundred dollars.

Sure, but if you don't have "a couple of hundred dollars", you don't. It's a bit like saying "Why are people poor? Just put $1 million into a savings account, then you'll get enough to survive each month". Great for the ones who can, irrelevant for the ones who can't.

I think most students in America have loans. For me, and everyone I knew, there was a credit balance after the school got paid and that money was put into your bank account.

Don't forget you have to buy books, etc., and they cost "a couple of hundred dollars" too.

When I was an undergraduate I was definitely on a knife's edge, but I also often had cash in the bank because I got a big cash infusion annually. I just had to live off a very strict budget at that time to make sure the money would last.

I wouldn't have wanted to rely on this service when I was a student, especially at that cost, but in a pinch I could see situations where it would make sense.

I myself was never given access to any funds or credit from student loans.

It would have been nice if I did though.

If you're able to scrape together the funds for another semester, you can probably scrape together a couple hundred bucks to avoid paying for that extra semester.

People going to university like to talk about how poor they are, but they're obviously not "can't manage a couple hundred bucks for college" poor. I've known a lot of constantly-bordering-on-homeless people, and they're usually lucky to even manage community college. UW is $13k a year just for tuition.

A lot of students at UW - especially ones in the CS department - come from rich families. A lot of foreign students as well - who again - come from a ton of money.

College is not cheap in the US. Going to any university in the US implies a certain amount of wealth, and barring that (scholarship, e.g.) then you must be someone who is incredibly motivated. In either case, spending a few hundred dollars to guaruntee a spot in a required course to keep your studies on track, to be accepted into your major, and to eventually graduate on time is worth AT LEAST a few hundred dollars. Like the other commenter, i also ended up needing to graduate a semester late due to this nonsense, which cost me thousands in actual money, and much more in lost potential income.

I haven't been in university in over 20 years, but when I was, I absolutely did not have hundreds of dollars to throw around for things to make my life more convenient. Certainly some of my peers did, but they were not in the majority.

Convenience was not a factor. If you were unable to sign up for some of these courses, you would be barred from advancing in your studies. These were things like prerequisites for applying to your major, not just shuffling around your timeslots for an ideal schedule.

Im unsure if this was much more of an issue at UW specifically (also this was also over a decade ago), but UW accepted maybe ~30% of the applicants to a given major (in STEM). They dont tell you this as a freshman when you declare your intended course of study, but you're competing with your classmates to actually be able to study what you want to major in. This leads to critical classes filling up within seconds, massive waitlists, and delays of semesters possible if you miss courses you need.

That system sounds so incredibly broken and exploitative. I'm sure it's a complete accident that the upshot is that some number of students have to spend tens of thousands extending their studies.

It absolutely is, especially realizing that a significant percentage of the applicants to these programs are international students, who have tuition fees 5x that of local students, and who have really no choice but to pay for another year of studies in order to reapply to their intended majors, or have wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars and multiple years.

I am obviously jaded, after spending 2 years of tuition there, only to be rejected from my intended major, and told to spend the next year re-taking classes.

You may want to consult with a lawyer. This is starting to sound like extortion.

100% this. You'd be surprised what kinds of problems go away when you mention your lawyer casually or you have a lawyer send a letter. Even if you don't get the right kind of lawyer right away, they might be able to recommend someone or tell you how to research the right kind of lawyer to get ahold of. Professionals are usually helpful about those kinds of things.

Also get a second or third opinion. I've sometimes gotten different answers from different lawyers about our prospects of success on things we've called about.

Don't mention a lawyer casually. Just have the lawyer send a letter. Don't give them the option to call your bluff. People casually mention a lawyer so frequently it means nothing. Receiving a letter from an actual lawyer means everything.

[flagged]

The one time I mentioned getting a lawyer over a grievance with a car dealership, the customer service people immediately stopped talking to me and said all further communication goes through their lawyers.

Whoops

That’s the only reasonable thing to do in their position. Anything you say from there can and will be used against you.

It’s also the best way for any customer service rep to eject from an unpleasant exchange. 100% done with you; lawyers problem now.

Yeah, lawyering up works best in silence. Don't announce it, especially if you won't actually do it. That's just a double defeat, you show your hand in advance and they get defensive.

It's all fun and games until you're called into a deposition.

Having a lawyer send a letter isn't an automatic win. Once you turn it into a legal threat you force them to escalate to their legal team. Reasonable lawyers would likely roll their eyes and talk the university back from this weird move, but you're not guaranteed reasonable lawyers on the other end. If they feel threatened they might start looking even deeper into into contracts you signed as a way to protect themselves or as legal leverage to silence you with further threats.

I've witnessed a couple cases where things went from hiring a lawyer, to sending a letter, to a stalemate where legal bills started getting so expensive that the only winners were the lawyers. When you're dealing with a big bureaucracy you can't count on them giving up at the first sight of a letter from a lawyer.

The legal route also takes time and locks any further conversations into the speed of both sides' lawyers. Time matters in this case because this student needs to get registered for classes, so anything that could stall that process needs to be weighed carefully.

I wouldn't be surprised if this issue magically goes away as soon as the publicity comes around to local news media and/or some alumni with connections.

Once lawyers are involved, they are always going to be the only winners.

What makes you think so?

Because even if you "win", you now have all of those lovely legal bills that the lawyer sends you. If you loose, you now have all of those lovely legal bills that the lawyer sends you. So the lawyer wins either way.

All campuses have student legal aid offices. I engaged one once myself when I was in university. Even though the complaint is against the University itself, in this case, attorneys are still subject to strict ethical rules and so you can at the very least get an honest read on the situation at a very low or no cost to you. (if they clearly demonstrate a conflict of interest, then you'll have an easy pro-bono case from a real lawyer against the University now for two things)

I would take a look at your Student Legal Aid office and get an appointment. Usually consultations are free.

You can't use the student aid legal office, which is part of the university, to help you sue the university. That's a non-waivable conflict.

Involving lawyers doesn't automatically mean you are going to court. Going to court is expensive, yes.

Most issues can be settled out of court for much cheaper. A good lawyer can help you make that happen.

Well yeah, if you hire someone to help you with something, you often end up owing them money, whether or not it ends up successful.

Whether it ends up being successful or not while still having to pay the lawyer is how the lawyer always win. This is not the gotcha you think it is

Hmmmm. Yes but, if I hire a programmer to build me an app and no one ever uses it, I still have to pay the programmer.

This is exactly the gotcha. You paid for a service. The outcome isn’t guaranteed.

Did you need to use a tractor to move those goal posts?

Did they move goal posts though? The original claim was that "once lawyers are involved, lawyers are the only winners." "Only" because "even if you win you still have to pay the lawyers."

Even if your app is successful, you still have to pay the programmers. Even if you sell the building, you still have to pay the construction crew. Even if you're packed during dinner service you still have to pay the chef.

None of these scenarios are painted as a pyrrhic victory because you had to pay the people who made it possible. All those people are generally paid hourly too. Is it because a good lawyer will bill you $400/hr? Is it because those generally have a lot more upside financially than simply winning a court case?

I think it's projecting anger from spec attorneys taking 40% of personal injury judgments, or class action attorneys making $50 million in fees when the people affected get checks for $8.72, but neither of those apply here particularly when you're paying an attorney $75 to send a demand letter template on their letterhead.

>I think it's projecting anger from spec attorneys taking 40% of personal injury judgments, or class action attorneys making $50 million in fees when the people affected get checks for $8.72, but neither of those apply here particularly when you're paying an attorney $75 to send a demand letter template on their letterhead.

Yes, that's the issue. He's poisoning the well. They get paid, but they aren't on the clock for $500/hr the moment you step in their firm.

Oncologists get paid even if the cancer kills you, that's not a good argument against oncologists.

If we're going to go the programmer goalpost: I charge a lot less to give a brief diagnosis on a code base than to go in and fix it. I'm not trying to be some cold moneu-grubber, I want to help solve problems.

I imagine consulting a lawyer is also a lot cheaper than preparing a case to sue for.

Except the original claim was that *only* the lawyers win.

Depends on the contract.

But I agree in general.

> Because even if you "win", you now have all of those lovely legal bills that the lawyer sends you

Oh come on, that's like saying when you involve engineers to build a bridge, the only people who wins are the engineers because you have to pay them.

Engineers don't get paid more when a project gets further delayed.

You've obviously never worked in consulting.

I've never considered the run of the mill management consultants as engineers, and yeah, I haven't worked in/as a technical consultant.

There are plenty engineering consulting firms. In fact, I'd go so far as to say all engineering firms are consulting firms except the ones that are a department within a larger construction or manufacturing company.

Consulting is when you're hired to advise someone else on a task, right? I'm not sure what service an outside engineer offers except consulting services.

Yes, I know engineering consultancies exist, and I've previously engaged with them.

My point is that engineering consultants, at least in the industries I've worked at, are not paid for the duration of the project, but for specific deliverables. Software is the exception in engineering, not the norm.

Management consulting != consulting in general.

Plenty of engineers and firms bill hourly, so yes sometimes they do.

Depends on the contract. If you're hourly, no. If you're on a time constraint yes. You need a new contract. It's a whole spectrum.

> Engineers don't get paid more when a project gets further delayed.

time & materials is a standard way engineering contracts are done

When lawyers are paid hourly to talk to each other on behalf of their clients, sometimes the bill can get sky high if not managed.

Ever get a $5 settlement check from a class action?

Good lawyers don't send letters automatically. They help the client whether that's involved the media, etc.

> Once you turn it into a legal threat you force them to escalate to their legal team.

Assuming we have the relevant facts of the case, it seems like when UW's legal team gets involved, they will tell the relevant people in the university's leadership "wtf were you thinking, de-escalate immediately, and allow this kid to enroll in classes and graduate", and the problem will go away for OP.

It's now been picked up by the local news stations.

https://www.king5.com/article/tech/university-of-washington-...

>Having a lawyer send a letter isn't an automatic win. Once you turn it into a legal threat you force them to escalate to their legal team

Sure. But I'd love to see what a legal defense would say to this situation of soft-expelling a student who was making use of a school provided API. then potentially extorting him with his graduation as leverage.

That might be the way to bet but casually mentioning a lawyer once worked for me on a used car warranty claim. I didn't make any threats, I just said "my mechanic says X and my lawyer says Y" and they said we'll call you back, which they did in ten minutes and said I was covered after all.

If that's actually what your lawyer says, then there's nothing wrong with that, but if you don't have a lawyer and they call your bluff, you're worse off than before you ran your mouth. So it's not really too much different than me telling about that one time I was in Vegas and I rolled a seven.

I had a buddy who was a lawyer, who spent a few minutes looking over the contract as a favor. There was no bet for them to call since I wasn't threatening action, just pointing out what the contract actually said (which my buddy confirmed for me).

It was under a thousand bucks so I could have just taken them to small claims court if they didn't fold. That may have worked in my favor.

So you just have to make sure you actually talk to a lawyer before you talk to anyone else.

Yes, you don't mention a lawyer, casually or otherwise. What you do is keep a paper trail, and optionally 'casually' notify the other party of said paper trail collection.

Definitely doesn’t hurt to get opinions when the other side has hundreds of resources and billions of dollars.

It is absolutely extortion. What a bunch of arseholes. I can't believe they even suggested that.

One half of me is sympathetic with you, the other wonders whether you're trying to get attention for a job (this is how the end of your LinkedIn post makes it sound).

It's hard to judge from the outside as you haven't shared the actual writing from UW.

I would probably cut this from the end of the LinkedIn post, this makes you look like you're possibly trying to blow this out of proportion for attention:

> I'm scheduled to graduate in a few months and am eager to move on to projects that don't need to be cleared with the UW Registrar. If you know of anyone looking for a full-time software engineer with a knack for getting the attention of senior leadership, please send them my way! I can start full-time in June

Your LinkedIn profile states you graduated high school mid 2023 and started at UW mid-late 2023. How can you graduate in a few months already? That would mean you'd just take 2 years instead of the normal 4?

Something definitely smells.

It's possible there's deception here, but I also knew a few kids in high school who graduated with their Associates (equivalent to 2 years of college). This can allow a student to skip the general education courses and focus exclusively on major coursework, which depending on the program and how well the student can schedule classes can mean finishing in 2 years.

Their profile also mentions "Stanford Summer Session" in Jun 2022, which does give college credit, so Associates or not they were definitely more active in pursuing a degree than most high school students.

> That would mean you'd just take 2 years instead of the normal 4?

FWIW my wife was a fourth-year the start of her second year at uni because she'd tested out of a ton of basics or taken dual-credit courses in high school. I was a fourth-year the end of my second year.

I AP'd my way out of 6 hours of English, 14 or so hours of Spanish, 8 hours of physics, 8 hours of calculus, and a hodgepodge of psych, sociology, etc., plus I'd taken some uni courses as a high school student as well.

I basically spent two years taking nothing but upper div math classes + a year living in Japan working on a second degree.

AP classes, my friend, save you so much time and money.

Only saves time if you consider being in university a waste of time instead of an opportunity to be free to learn what you are interested in and surrounded by like-minded people.

Oh it’s great. But depending on what country you are in, it could be the difference between a lifetime debt, and economic freedom.

University is definitely not a place where you are free to learn whatever you want, unless you already have all your credit points.

If you have all the credits done within 2 years you can spend the other 2 years learning whatever you want :)

University is an expensive credential to check off a box for most people. I'm not one of those people, and sounds like you aren't, but for most people, it is.

> One half of me is sympathetic with you, the other wonders whether you're trying to get attention for a job (this is how the end of your LinkedIn post makes it sound).

Why not both. I hire, and it crossed my mind to reach out to him when I read the ending. The project shows ambition and independent thought, two virtues in my book.

He's smart to leverage the attention. Might as well get some benefit out of the university's heavy-handed policing here.

I'm not sure whether I can trust the story as he presents it. The fact that he might be out for attention is a reason to have doubts, because he might have made the case look more extreme than it is so it trends better.

There are a couple of other question marks:

- Says he'll graduate this year, but he's only started at UW 1.5y ago, his project team mates also started 1.5y ago, so the course does not seem to be super advanced

- Claims he did the project on his own in the LinkedIn post, when in fact it was coursework by a team of 6

- The docs promise stuff that are entirely unimplemented, I couldn't find anything related to talking to the UW API

It must have been a survey course. Frankly, I found the course rather elementary.

What's a survey course? It turns out that at least another team in the same course had the exact same app idea: https://www.sammybharadwaj.com/huskyswap - even same name. Sounds like this idea was either given by the instructor or the groups cooperated on choosing it.

Hence the idea of swapping must not have been the problem here, otherwise surely the instructor should be more in trouble than OP, and this other website shouldn't still be up.

I remember that class - it was just between recess and lunch!

In general I worry about ragebait stories that trend on HN.

They're sometimes legit, but way too often there's a quiet coda where someone figures out it was all a sham, but that discovery occurs after the story has already been drawing attention for 24 hours or more, and the recall doesn't get the attention the initial rage did. So people walk away remembering a story that was a lie, while the truth gets quickly forgotten.

I also worry about this which is why I've been researching things and posting my findings here. I wish this got picked up by at least the student newspaper. UW should be able to present their side. Hard to predict whether we will ever know the truth.

https://www.geekwire.com/2025/uw-and-computer-science-studen...

> 1.5y vs 4y

That's pretty common. Details vary, but having 1-3y of credit you can transfer in and then only having to stick it out for 1-3y to navigate the maze of upper-level course requirements happens all the time.

In my case, MN heavily subsidized AP and CLEP tests at the time and didn't require you to take the class to take the test. A couple heavy weeks of testing later, and 2yrs of college was banged out. Toss in the fact that the credit cap per semester is just a guideline the dean is happy to override, and finishing early is all but guaranteed.

A hundred or so of my high-school classmates had other paths to similar endings. They took AP courses almost exclusively in HS, and their last year or two they'd spend a lot of their HS getting dual credit from a local community college. They all started with at least a year done, usually much more.

Washington state (and many others, I'm assuming) have systems in place that allow high school students to take collegiate level classes in lieu of high school classes.

Done to completion, it is possible (and becoming more common) to exit high school with an Associates degree and the first 2 years of college completed.

>the other wonders whether you're trying to get attention for a job (this is how the end of your LinkedIn post makes it sound).

Good, this market is brutal and I don't think it'll get much better in June. Gotta do whatever you can to stand out as a junior.

>How can you graduate in a few months already?

Various factors. Assossiates degree. Hyper accelerated program between AP classes, certain CC programs in high school, and high college workload. Simply grammatical errors on dates.

UW CSE alum (but graduated 1^H25 years ago).

You should at least talk to a guidance counselor if you are close to graduating. They have a lot of incentive to get you graduated, and would probably just register you for your courses manually (because...you weren't officially expelled so there has to be a way). Anyways, the counselor will have options for you, and won't be constrained by whoever is running the registration site (and aren't going to be their allies either). If that doesn't work, go to UW administration, they are going to be less interested in allying with the tech department the higher up you go (unless this came from them, and not the tech department?).

Alternatively, if you can put your work with the university on your CV, it isn't a clear loss for you. You should also consider getting a lawyer involved, but it might be better just to get what you can and graduate.

This is some sound advice. The student hasn’t actually been expelled, he’s just pissed off the registrar, by making an an app that says “HuskySwap is a platform designed for students at the University of Washington ("UW") to swap classes with one another. ” (against the rules) but not expelled.

This is a huge story and if it goes viral, it could put a lot of heat on UW. Write a detailed post on your LinkedIn, Twitter, anywhere that could get the attention of media. Better yet, link your post here and I'd gladly help spread the word. What UW is doing is extortion especially for their fuck-up. Be polite in your post and just write down the facts.

Twitter, Substack and Bluesky is where journalists are too right?

Might be best to talk to that lawyer first before risking libelling the Uni, or anything they could reasonably claim...

> I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.

An officious word for lawyer is counsel, because that’s what they’re for: they offer legal counsel. You don’t technically “talk” to a lawyer , instead you ask them questions. They answer. That’s why client-attorney privilege exists at all: so you can feel free to seek counsel, ie ask questions, without fear of those questions ever being held against you.

You’re right not to talk to a lawyer. Instead, you should ask them questions. Like “what’s the worst that can happen?” and “what are my options if it does?” and “ what documents / evidence would I need to defend myself?” and “what would you advise me not to do?”.

As a silly rule of thumb: every message to a lawyer should have at least one question mark in it. That is the role of legal counsel in our society. Use that privilege. Seek counsel.

Then, if you don’t want to do anything with their advice, that’s ok.

As a lawyer, your post is almost entirely incorrect. Privilege in no way depends on whether the communication involves questions.

It cracks me up. As a lawyer, I would never post on HN to argue about pointer arithmetic or inference optimization, yet the law seems to be fair game for amateur hour.

I don't think the post says privilege depends on whether the communication involves questions. I read it as saying that privilege exists so you can seek counsel. And, in their opinion, seeking counsel should always involve asking questions. Which seems reasonable to me. I am struggling to think of a situation where someone initiating contact with a lawyer wouldn't need, or at least want, to ask any questions. Are there situations where that is not the case?

> Privilege in no way depends on whether the communication involves questions.

I sure hope most lawyers don't often misread other people's writing as bad as you did here.

>I would never post on HN to argue about pointer arithmetic or inference optimization, yet the law seems to be fair game for amateur hour.

In all fairness, You would probably be ok with criticizing software or a website that didn't work for you and offer improvements or features. There's certainly nothing wrong with that.

I'm a software engineer who has had to explain the law (HIPAA) to lawyers before. It's probably best to assume that in a population there are people who are both an expert/professional of X, who can say intelligent things about Y.

I want to elaborate on what the GP said. The best way to use a lawyer in most circumstances is to ask them questions about actions you can take through the legal system and listen to their answers, treating them as a counsellor.

Mitchell Hashimoto (founder of Hashicorp [0]) did something similar to this, but to find open slots in courses he wanted in college according to his blog [1]. You're on the right track.

From the linked page: "As I began college, I noticed that the poor technical design of the registration system made it incredibly difficult to get the set of classes I wanted. I developed automated registration software that would detect open slots in the full courses, and notify me via text message. While my friends were spending hours every day refreshing course schedules hoping to get into a full class, I was just waiting for a text message. And I always got into the classes, because a human refreshing a browser can't beat my software that was checking thousands of times per hour. Automation wins again."

I thought I had read somewhere that he turned it into a product while he was in college, but that wasn't mentioned there.

[0] https://www.hashicorp.com [1] https://mitchellh.com/writing/automation-obsessed

I reckon most HNers in such a situation have made the same script, I know I did.

i did it literally yesterday! my sleep schedule's all out of wack, so i miss the slightly-late emails the public services send.

now i get a nice loud fire alarm beep to wake me up when someone drops a course i want ;^)

I didn't have to, my college provided fairly functional class scheduling systems. It had integrated wait lists, so you could just sign up and hope someone else drops if needed, and occasionally you could just have the professor add another slot (the college didn't mind the free extra money).

I had this in a state school that isn't even our state's premier state school, and we are not a state known for computer science or anything, why do all these supposedly premier institutions not offer it?

To be fair, in my case it wasn't in the US.

> It had integrated wait lists, so you could just sign up and hope someone else drops if needed

This just moves the scripting point to "signing up for the waiting list". I guess in that case it does mean that running it 24/7 wouldn't help.

> and occasionally you could just have the professor add another slot (the college didn't mind the free extra money).

You paid per course? In most of the world, you pay per semester and there are no per-course fees. So professors aren't particularly incentivized to take more students.

In our case, the number of professors and size of rooms was simply insufficient for the number of students. Especially if you wanted a good professor - where I was at the variability in quality of teaching was pretty high. Or for some people, if they wanted to schedule things so that all their courses were packed into 4 days of the week, or they didn't want to wake up early, or whatever reason for making a particular course be in high demand. This led to the necessity of such scripts.

It’s a fun coincidence that it’s the same university/college, Michael Hashimoto went to UW (CSE).

WTF!

That can’t be legal

This is bonkers, and sort of smells. I’m not saying you have outright said anything untrue, but there is at least some ambiguity that my mind is filling in, potentially incorrectly.

Can you clarify how you got the Swagger files? Were they publicly available?

Could you share the exact verbiage they used to seemingly extort labor and intellectual property from you?

Does the university have some previously existing (and communicated/documented) policy regarding swapping or trading seats?

I wouldn't answer this question if I were the OP.

https://webservices.washington.edu/sws/

Neither would I, but they're very good questions. If I was OP, I'd want to make sure my answers were watertight.

Honestly this. I agree the registrar can be shitbag; but having a method to request token access but also blocking the OP here even though he claims he never actually had real data on his site, but was planning on using the legally-requested-token to populate it in the future? That smells of half the story i think.

My guess being OP was probably running the service for months under-the-radar via scraping prior, and they didn't notice him until he requested the token to help clean up his data. Else they punished him before* he actually did anything wrong? yea, just smells.

This doesn’t even make sense… why is you rebuilding it for them even part of the discussion? You built a demo of something they didn’t like, so you took it down. That should be the end of it.

Saying you need todo it for free is bonkers. Students who work in the cafeteria get paid…

And the gap between “a greenfield project” versus rebuilding the app in their infrastructure is so huge… This type of app would take 6 months to build minimum. So insane.

If you only have a few months left, you will barely get out of the initial project scoping meetings talking to all of the various departments (legal, it, hr, etc etc)

Call a lawyer, there has to be some who specialize in educational rights violations. I can’t believe the state of education in this country that your own university would harm your life in such a way for an honesty effort to improve things. Fuck whomever at UW pulled this trigger, they need to be fired.

Nationally there’s FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, who (despite a recent name change) are focused on campus free speech rights.

Given all of the very public stories about university administrations and how they like to skirt the law/court system with their own tribunals and procedures and/or blackmail their own students to stay quiet why would you ever have a reason to have faith in them?

It's clear the ones running things do not care about their students. They care only about their bottom line and appearances. Don't let one or two nice administrators fool you. Get a lawyer.

> I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.

I would never ever trust those hypocritical bureaucrats in universities. They have power over your degree and your life, but you have nothing. They are businessmen and politicians (some of which actually had/will have a political life before/after the high education gig), not educators.

You high school teachers and university professors are real humans. Administrators are not.

Sounds like you are being blackmailed into working for them for free

Right, if he does work for them, he is worth a full time salary for a new software engineer. That is at minimum, he can argue that he is worth a company founder salary.

Founder salaries are generally not high (at least until the company becomes mature). They own a (significant) portion of the company and want to minimize burn.

But when the founder sells and remains working they generally get a good income.

On your post on LinkedIn, you said this:

> I was instructed to take down my demo site (and its handful of fake demo classes) or else they would begin the process that would culminate with my expulsion.

And now here, you say this:

> They followed up today to thank me for doing it, but also indicated that they were putting a hold on my account anyway. As a result, I am not going to be able to register for my final quarter and have been de facto expelled at the end of this quarter.

I don't think there's any reason to have faith that their leadership will make things right. It sounds like they've already moved the goalposts once, and there's no reason to trust that they wouldn't do it again later. They no longer deserve the presumption of good faith.

As an alternative to what the options here seem to be saying, I can't help but wonder if some other university might be more willing to work with you without having to go through all of the blackmail. If this is something that's actually valuable to UW, it probably would be valuable to others as well, and without the threat of expulsion, you might be able to get better terms from them; maybe someone here with a connection to a more open-minded university could help get the door open to making a more fair deal? If finishing your degree is important to you, and you still don't have any desire to make a business out of this, maybe some form of scholarship in return for making a system for them for something like this? Alternately, if you do end up wanting to own the IP and monetize it in some way, you could try to rework the idea to be a service you sell to universities rather than offer for free to students. Even if you don't want to sell it, you could always offer it to universities for free with some terms that require attribution to you (and maybe also stipulate that no one is allowed to share the code with UW, since you deserve some compensation from them even if you don't want it from anyone else).

The way that the leadership will make it right in the end is VIA YOUR LAWYER.

Without a lawyer they have no reason to do anything. You paid a lot to graduate, it is nothing short of foolish to squander that investment by forgoing legal representation while they try to extort you.

Don’t have any more unrecorded conversations with them. They are playing hardball and you are pretending that everything is a-ok, when it clearly isn’t.

It seems reasonable to at least attempt to resolve the situation by emailing someone higher up than whichever random bureaucrat put a hold on his account before immediately jumping to hiring lawyers.

The lawyer emails someone higher up, otherwise the higher up will simply smash the hammer harder to protect against liability. Showing up without representation here is a mark of unseriousness.

Adult businesspeople always have lawyers do the fighting for them; if you don’t it says more about you than the fight.

Not necessarily. The more damage you do to someone, the higher the potential liability. Smart business people usually know that de-escalating is often the best choice.

That’s just not true dude. Most professional adults try to resolve things amicably before immediately getting lawyers involved.

Lawyers are how professional adults resolve things amicably. Having your lawyer handle it doesn't mean the interaction isn't amiable, it means that the person amicably resolving the situation is both aware of their legal rights and responsibilities, and that the principal is savvy to the concept of liability because they have a professional advising them.

Almost all things resolved via lawyers are resolved professionally without a trial or a fight. This is literally the primary function of lawyers: to interface with the other party's lawyers and find a mutually consensual resolution to a problem without compromising your own rights and entitlements.

Showing up without a professional sends a clear signal to the other party that you're not interested in doing the minimum to protect your rights and ensure that the other party doesn't steamroller you, which incentivizes the other party to trample your rights and steamroller you, because there's a likelihood that you haven't been advised of your rights in full and don't have an immediate and convenient path to enforcing your rights against the counterparty. It's bush league.

Get a lawyer. Have the lawyer handle it. "Handle it" doesn't mean an immediate lawsuit, it's simply the way professional organizations indicate to other professional organizations that actions have consequences. No lawyer means you don't intend to cause them any consequences, which means you're ignore-able.

Also, treat email conversations as “unrecorded” if they’re using your university email address. Make sure to download a copy of all email correspondence to a storage device outside the control of the university.

This is really important, they can delete emails. And if they do, that's one more point for your case.

>I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.

What about their actions so far suggests that?

Yeah maybe OP really is grifting us all

I was a similar position as yours when I was at university. Do not have faith in your university administration.

This is extortion.

The lack of compensation sounds like extortion. Definitely consult a lawyer.

Most universities seem now to include IP rights grabs in the matriculation documents you have to agree to when starting your course. If you squint, and apply a dose of salt, the OPs side of things sounds like a compromise offer to move forward allowing the student not to give over current IP but to develop something new.

Depending on contracts, and local laws, that might be almost legal...

Realistically, and obviously I'm not a lawyer, but if it was developed as part of a course, I can see how that might (not saying I agree with it) make the IP rights assignment more complicated and maybe the university would have a leg to stand on?

This new development is practically a gift.

The last thing in the world you want at this point is to be getting into any big fights obviously, but wow did they just give you about 3 legs to stand on.

Please get a lawyer. This is a crazy, non-reasonable stipulation "They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate....unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for."

You need to figure out who exactly you are dealing with and who is making these decisions and then find out who you need to be talking to in order to get what you need. The person putting you on the hold is probably a very low level person in the registrars office. Probably start with going to your professors if you have good relationships with them or if not figure out how to speak with someone who understands and has more authority. I don't think lawyers are going to do much for you.

Be extremely careful about what you say online or to friends from now on. They may use anything against you.

Do not give any extra details about the project, do not comment on how it was made and what it used etc.

Might be too late for that: https://github.com/JDKaim/HuskySwap

Update on the Update:

> I feel terrible writing this. But here we are. Today UW issued an official statement that was obviously targeting me and sent it to the media. In their statement they point to the "Tampering & Abuse" policies outlined on the registrar's website. This is presumably to draw attention to this emphasized text: "Additionally, the creation of any service that enables any of the above behaviors is strictly forbidden and constitutes a violation of this policy." But this afternoon a university employee reached out to let me know that this text was literally added today. You can confirm for yourself by looking at the previous version (December 8 until today) at https://lnkd.in/ge4XCh8Z. Some people have been understandably skeptical about my story. This development doesn't provide evidence to refute their claims, but this should give you some context on how they're treating me. I just want them to remove my registration hold so I can graduate after next quarter and move on with my life. But I am definitely not meeting with the administration for a disciplinary struggle session when I am more confident than ever that I haven't violated any rules.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jdkaim_github-jdkaimhuskyswap...

[2025-01-10-Fri 19:31 UTC] <JD Kaim> Final update. The university has determined that I have satisfactorily complied with their request to take down the site, and I’ve said publicly that I do not plan to pursue anything like HuskySwap, so the hold has been removed without a meeting and I am back on track to graduate next quarter. I have thanked them for closing the matter.

> I am so grateful for all the moral support I’ve received from the community. My friends have been there for me, and I never expected people who didn’t even know me to reach out with so much encouragement. It’s been an overwhelming experience and I’m going to grow from it.

> I’m sorry if you reached out to me and I haven’t followed up yet. I’ve been dealing with this while trying to ramp on week 1 of a 17-credit workload that includes 3 400-level CS classes. I’m thinking of asking for some content writing credits for the time invested in all of this, but probably not until things have cooled off . I hope to be completely caught up by the end of the weekend.

-- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jdkaim_github-jdkaimhuskyswap...

Shut the fuck up and start calling lawyers now.

I'm a university professor, and this is batshit crazy.

Who? As in not "they" or "the university", but who within the university? Can you tell where the directive is coming from?

If this comes from, say, the Provost's Office then this probably can't be handled internally. (The position of Provost is the #2 position at a university, and the provost usually runs the show while the President or Chancellor goes schmoozing with donors.)

But if it's coming from the Registrar's Office, then the Registrar doesn't have that much power internally, and you might be able to fight this decision within the university. What they did is not only brazenly immoral, it is also a tremendous legal liability for UW, and it should and might be a firing offense for whoever is responsible. And quite frankly no matter what happens I would seriously consider hiring an attorney (you might find one who will work on contingency).

You might speak with any professors in the department you have a good relationship with; I would be very surprised if they were sympathetic to this decision.

You might also talk with the university ombudsman, Dean of Students, etc. -- although I would be a little bit cautious and polite here. Just calmly describe the situation and ask what you should do in this situation. Hopefully (but this is very far from certain), they will calmly offer to intervene on your behalf, and then they will go ballistic behind closed doors and absolutely rake the Registrar over the coals. In any case, be poker faced, don't fully trust them, and avoid committing to a particular course of action if you don't have to.

Finally, here's an amusing hack. Salaries at UW are public record. If you want to find out how important any individual person is in the hierarchy, look up how much money they make. It's a fairly accurate barometer.

https://fiscal.wa.gov/Staffing/Salaries

Universities are not monoliths, and the relationships between different power centers are usually mistrustful at best.

Best of luck to you.

Are those numbers a sum of the total benefits or something? It seems insane that a campus security guard is making 170k.

I don't know.

I knew that salaries at public universities are public in many states, so thought to google it -- but the details can vary.

It's total pay without benefits. It includes overtime and on-call time (which are typically paid at a higher rate).

It wouldn't surprise me that an experienced security guard is making $170K; the state itself is expensive, and they have to retain staff. The staff is often ex-cop, and guards very frequently work overtime (paid time-and-a-half or more). The guard may be a people manager (I don't know which row you're referring to but it looks like the typical guard makes far less).

It seems insane that you need campus security guards at all oO

Why?

Because police is a thing?...

A lot of campuses have actual police. In some ways campuses are similar to a municipality and have many of the services that entails (fire, trash, water, power, snow removal, parks, and security/law enforcement).

You could similarly ask why a town of 50,000 people needs a police department.

When you put it in terms of total number of people...it does make sense. A lot of universities down here in Texas have a small town+ amount of students and faculty and they tend to have their own police departments and other services.

My university had a police department because it is, as one might expect of a flagship state university, an enormous landmass with billions of dollars in infrastructure and equipment, plus about 6,000 full-time residents living in university-owned housing. Residents of a certain class of people who are prone to doing stupid, illegal shit.

Consider the liability to which a bad security guard can expose your organization! Not that pay guarantees quality but still

The head coach of football gets paid $4mil a year (4x the president) and is the highest payed employee. The top 7 staff are all sports related.

Is this, like, common in the US? It seems batshit insane to an outsider.

Yes, this is extremely common.

On the one hand, yes, this is absolutely batshit insane.

On the other hand, college sports are enormously popular; football games regularly play to sold out crowds of over 50,000, and during football season there will be games on TV all weekend (not just local ones). They bring in a lot of revenue and publicity for the university -- and the latter (debatably?) helps attract students to apply.

I'd never considered that a sports program could be revenue producing. That's quite interesting. Although it seems weird that higher education and (almost-professional) sports are so tightly coupled.

An interesting outsider perspective is this clip of Steven Fry going to an Auburn game: https://youtu.be/FuPeGPwGKe8

Regarding the latter, it’s weird and certainly was exploitative when college athletes weren’t allowed to monetize through sponsorships and frankly still is exploitative.

I was more thinking that there's not a particularly natural overlap between sports and academic ability. You'd think that by tying the two together, you'd get both worse sporting and academic performance than if they were unrelated.

The US has a decidedly liberal viewpoint on education. Sports ability is in some sense an educational endeavor. The ancient Greeks called it "athletics".

So US educational institutions don't really have any hangup against treating sports any differently than they might treat a CS class.

They are a subject you have to study and train at...and sometimes sit in a theatre and have a class time about (watching scout footage or deconstructing plays, etc).

Sports are probably just as rigorous as anything else academically once you get to something approaching a division 1 level of play. The reason we don't recognize it is because we suck and are mostly casual about it on a forum like this (filled with sports failures like myself or sports non-participants). The people actually in these programs with D1 scholarships and whatnot I guarantee take it as seriously as you or I would take calculus.

This is hardly an American phenomenon. The Bauhaus was famous for incorporating athletics too.

I never meant to imply that athletics wasn't a serious pursuit. I agree that physical capability is part of being a well-rounded person. It's certainly common here (Aus) for schools and universities to have sports teams and to strongly encourage participation.

What I find strange in the US context is the emphasis on it as a (revenue generating!) spectator sport. I understand that amateur (for want of a better word) sports can be highly entertaining; what I don't understand is why you'd go to university teams to find the best amateurs. I've played and watched enough sport to know that it's common for academic and physical abilities to be not particularly well correlated, particularly at tails of the distributions.

Not really. You can’t major in playing sports, you can’t get credit for it, and i don’t know what you mean by “as rigorous as anything else academically”, but it’s probably not true. I didn’t play division 1 anything but I did play in college (no scholarship).

It's batshit insane either way in the grand scheme of things. It just goes to show how market forces don't necessarily incentivize the things we actually want or need.

It seems like crowds of 50,000 people want this enough to regularly pay for it, subsidising other people’s education in the process.

A college like UW may have sports revenue on order of $300M, much of which goes to the university, and means students may pay less than if there were no sports. Dig carefully through UW finances, which are usually public record. Paying a coach whose program is a massive profit center enough to have a team of quality enough to land bigger TV deals may be a financial benefit.

I always see people saying that sports is financially positive on its own, but my actual experience is a ~10% tuition hike to subsidize sports expansion, so ...

Without knowing how much sports revenue offsets tuition, which I just showed you how to investigate, your 10% anecdote from millions of college students is irrelevant. It’s both possible sports offsets your tuition by 30%, and later you saw a 10% raise, but until you compute that initial offset your 10% gripe is meaningless.

My university's athletics program pulls in so much money and some of it funds academic programs. No money goes from academics to sports.

So the athletics department is not only self-sustaining and self-funding, but it funds academics as well.

It's basically as if Man U sent some of its profits to Manchester University.

Very common at larger state universities that have been around a long enough time to have a significant sports following.

It makes sense if you do the math.

Newer schools and smaller schools, typically not so much.

A lot of what we do in the US probably sounds batshit insane to outsiders so no worries about that and thanks for asking!

Universities in the US administer the main second-tier sports leagues for basketball and football, so yes, it’s common (though strange, I agree).

Yes, and not just at public universities.

Having worked in university administration before I would say that anyone who lasts as a manager is a professional politician, so expect them to have engineered a very good reason and possibly have allied with another department.

As manager pay is usually based on headcount instead of being aligned with good outcomes, they might just have threatened someone's mortgage payments. So, that manager might be willing to call in every favor and fight with everything they have got.

But yeah of course it's possible that they got into more trouble than they can handle.

Does your university have a student's union? I'm not sure if this is common in the US. But in the UK they're usually incredibly effective at sorting out this kind of issue.

Don’t rely on them “making it right in the end.” Get a lawyer. Get a referral from the WA State Bar Association for someone who is familiar with federal and state law regarding universities and will take $100 or so to send a letter that ensures you graduate on time.

Stop posting anything publicly until you’ve retained and consulted with an attorney.

You may wish to consider deleting this comment. You can always repost it later after you lawyer up.

As you describe it, this is so egregious that you might find pro-bono legal support from major advocacy non-profits like The Institute for Justice.

https://ij.org/

As you describe it, it sounds like some element of the university may have made a mistake, but (no offense) I'm not yet certain that you fully understand the situation and are being fully forthright.

Hopefully, the matter will be cleared up quickly and satisfactorily, for all parties.

> I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that [university] leadership will make it right in the end.

Ironically, the fact that you went public on what could be a delicate internal matter might've escalated things, more than consulting a lawyer would.

At a university, if there's at least one specific administrator or full professor who you both trust, and think has clout to resolve the matter satisfactorily, then trusting the university to make things right might be reasonable.

Or, if your university is a rare one that has unusually good conventions of honorable behavior, which you know are practiced by most (including administrators, faculty, staff, and students), and there are effective checks and balances for when that fails, then maybe you're also OK.

But, in most universities, when an official is talking about possibly ruining your career/life, then either you fudged up really-really badly (so, consult a lawyer), or you're in danger of learning just how bad a largely unaccountable institution of largely unaccountable individuals can get (so, consult a lawyer).

Also, if an official you're talking with ever asks if you've filed a lawsuit, and says they have to stop talking with you if you do, don't say that you want to work collegially with the university to resolve the situation internally. A shitty person hearing that will totally take advantage of naive you, to neutralize the risk from you. Run, don't walk, to consult a lawyer.

If you manage to have them tell you that in an email that will be the jackpot for you.

Confirmation emails are great for this.

"I was wondering if you could go over the details of the resolution we discussed on DATE? I'm giving it consideration and just want to make sure I fully understand. On reflection I feel like it could be a great opportunity. Could I put it on my resume'?"

Sometimes they stitch themselves up and it's glorious when it happens.

This sounds like they are trying to extort you.

Do what I did when UDub pushed me out: finish at UOregon.

Do you need an account to register for classes? Can't you just register in-person like I did back when we roamed the earth with dinosaurs?

At UW? No. You must log in at exactly 6am (preferably 5:58) on your registration day. Have your planned schedule in hand with all class codes and multiple backups. Assuming the system doesn't crash repeatedly, all of the required and/or popular classes will be full by 6:05.

Rinse. Repeat for the entire 2 weeks of registration.

This is pretty much how it works at every school I've ever attended. It ended up driving me towards "hacking" by writing a bunch of scripts to register as fast as possible, taught me some basic networking in the challenges I faced while doing that, and occasionally grabbed me a seat in a class I normally wouldn't have. However, I think a lot of other students in CS were also doing similar, because it would never make sense how stuff could fill as fast as they did. As a result, sometimes I would have to beg to be allowed to take a graduate level course to fill a requirement, just because it had seats. Ended up working out for me, as one of those graduate professors ended up offering me a job in my 2nd to last quarter, but I wouldn't be surprised if such overloaded systems just brutally sabotage people's entire education.

It's amazing how little things have changed. I was Cornell class of '03, and this is basically how we registered for classes (though the "system" was a Java AWT app rather than what I assume is now a website) 25 years ago. It was a miserable experience. There has to be a better way to solve this problem.

>This platform was never intended to be monetized, and I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.

So, they

- gave you an ultimatum for a project you personally worked on

- you complied

- they soft-expelled you anyway

- they coerced you under this expulsion to do free labor to improve their own site.

- heck, you are paying 10's of thousands to them to attend school. So you are paying them for the privilege to work on their site so you can be re-instated into school to out you into debt.

I've worked in the game industry for some 9 years now. Your talent is being exploited. I'm not going to tell you to sue, but you should definitely cut all ties immediately and find another school ID this is how they are treating their budding talent. They clearly have no respect for you. This happens all the time in my industry full of passionate talent. You gotta look out for yourself first before you dedicate yourself to others.

EDIT: Ahh, I see you're almost graduating. In that case just do what you can to get back in and get far away. But do NOT provide any free labor for them. I don't know the exact ideas but you may at least want a Lawyer to send a warning shot. This feels like coercion, but I can't say for sure.

> have been de facto expelled at the end of this quarter. Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university

Not a lawyer, but this is outrageous and feels like a breach of the university-student contract. Point to the other students that must perform surprise labor for the university as a precondition for course registration. This is like paying your debt to the early 1900s company store. Absolutely lawyer up.

With apologies if I'm misunderstanding or my glasses are too rose-colored. Is it possible that there are crossed wires here?

You say: "They followed up today to thank me for doing it, but also indicated that they were putting a hold on my account anyway. As a result, I am not going to be able to register for my final quarter and have been de facto expelled at the end of this quarter."

Is it possible that some tiresome UW admin person has put your account on hold while this is being sorted out, but they haven't connected the dots that you now won't be able to register? Is the "de facto expulsion" an unintended consequence rather than a deliberate punishment?

And then perhaps this person is trying to say, hey, there's a way we could keep your project going if it's an official project, but we don't have budget for it. Let's discuss if that would work for you. And perhaps this was intended to be a suggestion for a positive outcome, rather than an IP-grabbing maneuver.

And when you say, "it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate." I totally get that it feels that way, but is it possible that such an aggressive implication wasn't intended?

This might be wishful thinking on my part. It just seems so hard to believe that anything you've done comes remotely close to actual expulsion, and this idea that you'd be forced to work to graduate seems like a total head-scratcher that wouldn't stand up to any scrutiny. I'm hoping that this is just a poorly-handled, poorly-worded communication from this department.

talk to a lawyer, it doesn’t mean taking action, but I’ve been in a number of situations at work that were quite “grey”, and the value of knowing where I stood, where the lines were, and what to do/not to do were invaluable. I never planned on taking legal action, but knowing the landscape was invaluable and often kept me out of trouble down the road when people were playing CYA…

You've encountered a psychopath in the wild. "You did such a good job we want to show our appreciation by _stealing your work and threatening your future to do it while compensating you nothing_."

It's so egregious. If you do a gofundme for legal support where would you post it? So we can follow you there.

Sounds like UW does not follow its own Honor Code.

>Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.

I am altering the deal, pray I do not alter it any further.

This does sound like extortion, please don’t get pushed over!

Please don't listen to all of these folks who are trying to bring conflict into your life. You did something interesting, and learned a lesson about how big institutions actually work. It is a great story, and one that you can tell your friends.

The easiest path forward is to do what it takes to graduate, it sounds like you are one quarter away. Smile, play nice, help out where you can. Get everything in writing.

Definitely TALK to a lawyer and have that in your back pocket. It is likely there is some sort of legal aid through the law school and you can. However, only use this as a last resort. It would be no problem for a university to drag something like this out for months or years and you will be left without a degree.

There is already conflict in his life at this point. The question is how best to resolve it. The school is in a position of authority and is telling the student that after spending tens of thousands of dollars at his school, he can't register for his final quarter necessary to graduate, unless he provides additional free work for them. This absolutely should not be tolerated.

Everyone in this thread is simply suggesting he talk to a lawyer. The lawyer can help guide him on the next action to take.

That's reasonable advice if he could cease to work on his project and status quo were resumed, but from his telling of events, it sounds like they're saying he can't study at all unless he works for them for free. Such a scenario would be extortion, and is worth taking the stand on IMO.

| I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.

Please do not plan based on anyone's goodwill only, especially in this one you have such a high stake. I'd at least consult a lawyer at this point, even if it means you don't take any legal action.

Others have already told you that talking to a lawyer is still a good idea. If I may offer a personal story that illustrates that that is _really_ a good idea:

While I did my Bachelor's in CS, I was employed by a university (not the one I attended, but one that the project I worked on moved to after the Prof in charge switched universities) as a "student worker" type deal. My job was essentially a Jr. SWE.

A friend of mine also worked on that project, but he was ahead a bit further in his studies, so he already had a BSc degree, while I hadn't. Universities being universities, this meant that his hourly pay was a tiny smidge more than mine (think 50 cents/hour or something like that). Neither of us was paid very well, we both came out to about 10-12 €/hour.

After 6 months my contract was up for renewal. Along with the renewal, they included a modest pay raise to my friend's level. I naively thought that that meant they appreciated my work or something like that. All went well until the _next_ renewal was up.

The HR person responsible for student workers noticed that my "raise" had been in error because they assumed I had gotten my degree as well. None of their paperwork that I signed originally mentioned that. As "proof" that I "should have known" that the raise was in error, they sent along a scanned copy of a copy of a copy of an internal "wage schedule" that I somehow should've been aware of.

Their solution was to hand me a "new" backdated contract with lower hourly wages and told me to sign that to "just quickly fix this error" and told me to just pay back what I had "erroneously" received (signed contract stating the contrary nonwithstanding).

I politely declined because that's not how I think employment works. As a response they said "ah well, don't worry, we'll just take it out of your next pay check", which they did (without me signing anything).

At that point I called my mom and told her the full story. She immediately went "Alright, how do you want to play this? Should we talk to them or do you want to pull out the big guns?". I was sufficiently pissed off that I told her I want the big guns, she told me the info for my families' "lawsuit insurance" (The German term is "Rechtsschutzversicherung", basically cheap-ish insurance to help you pay for a lawyer in cases like this) and called them after we talked.

I called up a lawyer in town that specialized in employment law, had an appointment with him to tell him the story, he went "I can see roughly 4 or 5 reasons that they can't take that money from you, let me write a letter to them and we'll see how it goes".

The end result was that the university in my next paycheck included the amount they had initially reduced my previous check by, my higher-wage contract was renewed, and we never spoke of any of that again. I didn't get an apology or anything from the HR admin who had clearly messed up my contract and was probably trying to cover her ass, but that's fine with me.

Point being: talk to a lawyer, even just to get some advice or to have them write out a nice letter as to why what they're doing is not OK.

Find out what "agree to work" means, they may have very different ideas then you on what effort they're asking for. Also you only need to be in good graces with registrar office until classes begin. So maybe just say what they want to appease them then make long timelines, slow roll and eventually ghost when you have your diploma. "As a solo dev this will take over a year", "I don't want to stress the API during registration season", "My employer doesn't allow me to work on volunteer projects"

They're using bureaucracy to save face for themselves. Once this is out of view, they're going to forget about it.

> I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.

That's incredibly foolish. UW has treated you very poorly at this point, and they have all the leverage and power here. You need to protect yourself legally. You've done nothing wrong (AFAICT), and yet you've been threatened with expulsion, and now they are attempting to extort you: "provide us with uncompensated labor or we won't let you graduate".

You might even have a criminal complaint around that last bit. Assuming good faith by the university (an entity that has already shown plenty of bad faith) is naive, to say the least.

Am I reading it correctly that you asked for a read only access token, never received the token or accessed the site with your software, and got a take down notice for your demo that only had fake data hours after asking if you could read data?

> [The university will not defacto expel me at the end of the quarter if] I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.

Holy shit. Do you have this in writing? If you do, transfer the records to several places that YOU control... don't rely on University-controlled systems to keep this information safe.

If they relayed this to you verbally, and you are in a one-party-consent state, did you record the conversation?

If your report is reasonably accurate, they are absolutely NOT acting in good faith and absolutely WILL NOT act in good faith. If you have records of their statements, you should take those records to a lawyer and ask for advice.

There's requests for evidence / input on the Seattle subreddit if you have time - I think locally we can get some pressure on them for you if you can back it up: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1hyhzf0/student_fa...

> I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end

As you will soon learn, having faith in any of these big institutions will lead to disappointment. Having faith in people you know personally is one thing, but this is a group of people you don't know who are missing incentives to do right by you. The best thing you can do is what you've already done, which is showing people the discrepancy from what they say and how they act. This will save others with similar misconceptions about UW being a reasonable organization from attending.

You may want to check what the conditions are on transferring credit from other schools.. In some schools you only need a limited portion of credit from your own school and a sign off from an appropriate professor for equivalences.

You write: "I'm scheduled to graduate in a few months"

Is the UW CS Bachelor just 2 years? Your LinkedIn profile states that you started there mid-2023, so you've been there for just 1.5y. What am I missing?

You can definitely bang out all the major requirements in 2 years if you don't need any gen ed classes (e.g. community college or other transfer credits). ~18 class-quarters of requirements, 3 classes/quarter => 6 quarters. Possibly as short as 4-5 quarters if you can manage a higher courseload.

Wow, really? So you just pay for a year instead of 4 years? Why do people not do that more?

You normally pay per credit, so not quite, and also that way you'll have lower grades, fewer chances to get internships, and make less connections.

UW charges the same fixed credit rate for 10-18 credits/quarter then adds significant per-credit fees above 18 to explicitly discourage super high courseloads.

Yep, pretty common, at least they allow it though - mine wouldn't let you take such a courseload unless you had a stellar academic record, and they would require grades significantly above average to recognize equivalent classes from lower education.

You can double up on a lot in high school (AP, IB, dual enrollment) or CLEP out of a good number of GenEd classes, but not everybody has the access and support they need to pull that off. There's potential value in going to college (as in _being in college_) that isn't strictly measured in credit hours as well.

Oh absolutely, most of the value is being there not in the credit hours. At Cambridge Uni you can't just condense the time for a BA, no matter how brilliant you are. You spend time 3y on learning. If you're fast, you just learn more.

You still need the gen ed credits from somewhere. And you have to actually get in to the major, which is hard for UW CSE (desirable major with limited spots).

Because you have to go to a high school that offers special courses, you have to be willing to work much harder than the average student, and you have to know about this trick when you're like 15yo and comprehend how much $$$ and time it's going to save you in the long run.

I fortunately did take advantage of this, and so did my wife. Thought we took advantage of it so we could do cheap study abroad and not have to take any courses toward our degree plan (indeed, I actually earned a second degree in a completely unrelated field while doing my study abroad)

But to be clear, this was because I took every advanced class offered at my high school and took other courses at the local community college instead of hanging out with my friends during lunch, etc. It was a constant gaming of the system to eventually get the results I wanted.

In Washington, high school students can enrol in community college courses through their school, and count them for both high school and college credit.

https://www.seattlecolleges.edu/running-start

The critical part is getting all the non-exciting stuff done at community college. There’s a useless cultural construct we have that says that CC is for a lower tier of student. Obviously this is absolute poppycock, since paying $2000 a year for college vs $20,000 only proves that you don’t like pissing away money. It’s not like English 112 is taught by world-class professors at Stanford or UW. It’s taught by some random TA. But many types of people (even myself) felt pressure to “attend a 4-year school” right from the start.

The best argument for it actually is purely social — community colleges (for no real reason though) don’t have dorms, so the ‘commuter school’ experience can be socially isolating, whereas for outgoing types mixing with all your fellow freshman in a dorm can be very socially rewarding and help establish major friendships. I think they should add on-campus living to community college.

Note: this isn't true for some universities that limit transfer/AP credits. I remember some of my classmates not taking their AP tests senior year of high school because of it.

We're specifically talking about UW CSE here.

What they're doing isn't just wrong, it's abusive and possibly illegal, and I'm sorry that you're having to deal with this.

Please seek legal advice and do not take anything they say at face value. They're engaging in bad faith and preying on your fears and ignorance.

Just remember that your didn't do anything wrong, and I hope that you don't get discouraged from your future pursuits, I'm almost certain that there are employers out there who will love this and offer you a great start your career.

> and I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.

They've already demonstrated that they won't, so faith is misplaced

"Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate."

Sue the ever living hell out of them. They are forcing you to work for them unpaid. Call multiple labor boards and drag them into UW immediately.

This is an awful PR situation for UW. Whoever thought they could hold a students ability to graduate hostage in exchange for _free_/slave labor is fucking insane. The people behind that decision need to be publicly named and subsequently fired.

In addition to raising hell on the public front. I would be consulting with attorneys to discuss what can be done in court to compel the UW to do the right thing.

Don’t be naive and think uni leadership will “make it right in the end”.

I always thought that anything you create belongs to them in perpetuity. Stanford has the same rule which allowed them to own PageRank

I don't think that applies for students who are not paid by the university?

IANAL, obvs, but their is a consideration, the provision of education, so a contract can be formed. AFAIK, IPR clauses are standard (but I know nothing about this jurisdiction).

Do not have faith. Once they pick some dumb track, they will stick with it until they either lose legally or lose in the court of public opinion (donors). See also: Oberlin.

If this is a one-party state, record those calls!

Best thing to do is to lure them into overestepping themselves in writing, and the extortionate demand that you work for free is heading in that direction.

Wait! What!

I sort of understand the part they wanted you to shutdown the website. Maybe its a copyright issue, even though the website only showed dummy courses.

I don't understand why they'd not let you sign up for classes to graduate, it seems like you were operating in good faith, and a University would lean towards the student. It doesn't seem like there was any indication of monetization here.

I'm definitely flabbergasted by their stance on asking you to build the same feature as an extortion mechanism.

I've lived in WA for ~9 years, and held UW in high regard as I often interact with graduates at my day job. But, this leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Hope the University admin that is involved in these series of decisions, receive health as more leadership gets involved with this going viral.

This is blackmail - it’s wrong. It’s fairly obvious you can’t trust them, at the very least ask a lawyer.

> the way they handled it makes me just want to walk away.

Assuming you mean the project, not your degree, that sounds reasonable but from your description it also sounds like they aren't willing to let you do that. Hence the advice to at least talk to a lawyer.

> This platform was never intended to be monetized, and I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.

Hopefully the Streisand Effect will force them to do the right thing.

I upvoted your LinkedIn post.

This is so outrageous that I have trouble believing it. If it's true, you need to immediately take this to the media.

Withholding your ability to attend school so that you can labor for another free of charge is more generally known as human trafficking.

Academic work, including for undergrad classes, is often owned by the institution you are enrolled at. Presumably, they already own the IP.

They expell you unless you work for free? What?? That's extortion and slavery. Im pretty sure you could sue them.

You are being exploited. Drag their ass to court.

That's concerning. I can see why IT wouldn't be giving API keys to random students. Who on the uni side is doing this?

Take the project, do your finals and then throw the project again if you don't want to take the legal course.

If UW is anything like my state university your advisor should be able to access the system on your behalf.

Gut reaction is this feels like petty and vindictive retaliatory behavior hiding behind an official façade.

You need a lawyer. They will 100% bully the F out of you to get what they want. Do not assume good faith.

are JD Kaim and Ed Kaim related?

Yes: https://x.com/EdKaim/status/1877146069093466344

? that is so ridiculous that it almost triggers my BS detector

you enrolled in a predatory institution designed to indebt workers forever. theyre not there for your interest. social media blast, leave, and potentially litigate.

given the type of UW blackmail you need to contact a lawyer to protect your right to an education finishing your studies....do not delay that step

> as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.

They are actively trying to fuck you over- stop hoping and having faith that it will somehow magically work out. Your degree is at stake. You need to escalate, and that starts with talking with a lawyer.

Right now, you are being the worst kind of naive.

> I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.

don't be daft. they are already blackmailing you for free labour.

What? You didn't even do anything? This is extortion.

This is just regular old extortion

When I read your initial post I figured it was knee jerk reaction, and like many no’s was only the start of the conversation.

Now it sounds like you’ve got some sociopaths on the line. I would gather information and fish them to get very specific about their request and threat, then kindly turn it around on them. Be prepared to go above their heads all the way to the board if necessary.

Most universities have sliding scale (down to zero fee)law services available for students.

Things like tenant rights, criminal cases, immigration, consumer, employment, wills, health care directives, power of attorney, name change, etc.

You should make use of them. Especially if your educational career is being impacted “a hold” (whatever that means). If it was coursework project then your professor also should have some sway if he or she has tenure and any integrity

Good luck

> I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.

Yikes, they're going to walk all over you.

This is absolutely ridiculous... shame on UW. Their quid pro quo offer is ethically very wrong.

My wife works at a major public university and fights with antiquated software and business systems all day long. The amount of IT system bloat and 'village-idiot dumb' processes for managing course offerings, course catalogs, class schedules, etc. is pretty bad at a lot of universities.

Please retain council.

your intuition is correct.

your creativity is correct.

enjoy your spotlight.

I for one would absolutely donate to your legal defense (offense?) fund. This isn't right and whoever decided to approach this in this manner should lose their job and never have an authoritative position in higher ed ever again.

Lawyer up

Uh yeah you should get a lawyer, they are threatening to kick you out unless you do work for free?? That’s crazy! How can they justify this?

@jdkaim do the project as a way to say you're sorry, give them the work uncompensated (effectively they're charging you the value of your degree, I'd assume that's not trivial).

Once you have your degree, you can go from there, hire a lawyer, sue for uncompensated labor (something about minimum wage laws, I think, requires they pay you), and so on. Maybe even some emotional distress.

But hey, IANAL and ya gotta do what you think is right.

This is probably the right answer. Similar to "dont fight the police on the street, fight them in court". Can even quiet-quit during the project if you need to.. software can take an awfully long time to build..

Also, track your time during the work. And keep all correspondance. Paper trail, paper trail, paper trail.

Yes, very clever. Have them deliver the diploma while you deliver the software... ever...so...slowly... and then, charge for consulting fees to make it work after you graduate!!!!

if anything, thanks for letting us all know that University of Washington blackmails their students in bad faith. hopefully this will save at least one other kid from being taken advantage of like you are clearly being and go to a superior institution that doesn't do these kinds of things.

not a laywer, but this sounds like you are being dicked.

Bro, fuck them. Put the site back online.

bro what money do you think you are holding on to? Just let it go and graduate or move onto another school. How will they "make it right". They just want you to stop messing with the reg system. Its their school not yours. For better or worse. Hell, you chose them.

> I immediately took down my class project site after receiving yesterday’s ultimatum.

Never do this.

You are on the right, they are on the wrong. This makes sound like you are doing something wrong.

Standing your ground on what you believe is right - technically, legally, ethically, ideology - would be what make you very successful in the long term.

Focus on graduating.

Accept that you have lost, take the offer.

It's unlikely that you will have to do more than attend a few meetings and write some emails, possibly provide some code samples. The goal is likely not a complete working solution but to punish you for unwittingly countering someone's reason for needing a large team (and therefor you are threatening their pay).

Quite possible the desired solution here might be you agreeing to say that a proper solution can't work safely with the university systems for some made up reason.

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