Demoted and Placed on Probation
When I write code at work, I write so according to guidelines that my employer and my teammates have produced, not all of which I agree with. We mostly write in Java, which I don&#x27;t really like as a language (I&#x27;m lucky enough to be on a team that writes Python, but if I need to work with another team&#x27;s code or a common library, I need to write Java). We run Python tests with unittest instead of pytest. We format our code with the `black` autoformatter, even though I disagree with several of its approaches. And so forth. I still follow the recommendations, because I&#x27;m working as part of a team, and none of the recommendations are egregiously unreasonable - they&#x27;re just not what I would have preferred.<p>The recommendations of the university working group seem similar. Well-intentioned people can reach different conclusions on these things, but none of them are egregiously unreasonable. You don&#x27;t <i>have</i> to use the BMI exercise; there are enough other exercises that solve the goal of inputting some numbers and calculating a simple formula based on them. None of them are even at the level of saying, you must teach a thing you don&#x27;t believe. (He&#x27;s not even, say, a biology professor asked to teach&#x2F;not teach evolution. He&#x27;s a computer science lecturer, and none of these recommendations are about the facts of computer science itself.)<p>As a professional software engineer, if I picked a fight about the coding guidelines, I would in fact be spending a significant amount of my political capital. If I find something very important, it&#x27;s possible I can slowly try to convince people of one thing, and have it reflect positively on me. But if I picked a pointless fight - like saying that we should standardize on double quotes in Python instead of single quotes - my management would be right to question whether I was more interested in doing my job or in getting my way.<p>And if I were to say that I wanted to work on &quot;heterodox engineering,&quot; I would be surprised if my management <i>did not</i> question whether I was in the right role. By his own admission, this man&#x27;s &quot;best teaching&quot; is in areas entirely unrelated to computer science - why is he confused about having trouble getting tenure in a school of computer science?<p>For all that <i>Quillette</i> seems to dislike professional victims, they appear to have published one.