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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.