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Comment by tokinonagare | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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