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"Ok class, for the rest of the semester, we're going to use the C89 standard".
I forgot the return 0; at the end of my main function and lost points on a test. Decided to be a point slut to ensure an A in the class and argued that it's allowed in the C99 standard. The professor sighed and gave me back my points, but next class specified the exact standard he was grading by.
I have to admit it sounds stupid to deduct points for that anyway, a test should measure your ability to reason, not your ability to remember trivial formalities.
Yes, but it's easier/less effort to grade that way which is why so many do it
Unfortunately C needs you to remember a lot of formalities and best practices to keep things from blowing up in your face. So I think it makes sense in this case.
I definitely agree that breaking best practices in a way that could lead to UB or hard-to-find bugs should give point deduction. The sole requirement shouldn't be "write standard compliant code".
However, a test does not simulate a real-world development environment, where you will have time to look through your code with fresh eyes the next day, and maybe even have someone review your code. The only thing a test reasonably simulates is your ability to solve the "thinking" part of the problem on your own. Thus, deducting points for trivial stuff that would 10/10 times be caught, either by the compiler, the developer or the reviewer, but isn't "strictly correct" just seems pedantic to me.
To be fair, other than the example by OP I have a hard time coming up with things that wouldn't be either caught by the compiler or are very bad practice (which should give point deduction).
89 or 99? Gotta ask if we're being pedantic ๐
"Train new people"
What do you think is going to happen if you hire a brand new person out of college, give them no directions, mentorship, processes, or procedures, and literally say "don't ask me, I pay you to figure it out"?
I can work in a "ask for forgiveness, not permission - move fast and break things" culture. But then people shouldn't be getting mad when shit breaks.
What did you break?
They were already broken, I just gave the ok to throw them out. They had been sitting there for more than half my lifetime, no one was doing anything with them, near as anyone could tell I was now the "owner" of them, I wasn't going to waste my time investigating 15 year old problems. So I said, "sure, make them disappear".
Someone in Finance took issue with that, something about making the $15 million value of those parts appear on the books correctly. Nice to get my first high-dollar mistake out of the way early!
Thats really on whoever started saving them originally. Anything being saved like that should have a note attached stating why it is saved. I have some parts that need to be sent for repair and each of them has a note stating what is wrong, when it broke, and to contact me with questions.
Damn, what kind of 15 year old broken parts are still worth $15 million?! I feel like they should have been depreciated to nothing, like, a decade ago, unless they're made of unobtanium or something.
"on the books"
As a second-year uni student I applied for a tutoring job at the university. I was still underage by a few weeks when the semester started, which caused them a bit of extra bureaucratic hassle when I was supposed to sign the contract.
After that, they've added a question "are you going to be at least 18 when starting the position" to the application form :D
"New lab rule: no Ph.D. defences in poetry form."
Still passed and had a grand old time.
Please use your powers for good and not such chaos
Appropriate username. Iโd say both. Both is good.
Where I work in software development, we were about to undertake writing a pretty large application from scratch. Mostly, the company was a Java plus Spring shop with a few exceptions. One team wrote almost exclusively Python, for instance. But as far as I knew, there wasn't any specific policy requiring the use of any particular language.
So as a team, we pushed to write our new project in Python. It was originally my idea, but my team got on board with it pretty quickly. Plus there was precedent for Python projects and Python was definitely appropriate for our use case.
The managers took it up the chain. The chain hemmed and hawed for months, but eventually made a more official policy that we had to use Java (and Spring).
No nested SQL queries allowed.
Edit: it was for a built in query language to populate dashboards (think Jira JQL meets Domo).
I had some inefficient SQL queries that meant we had to put some guardrails around user input so others didn't take down prod like I did
That's a very stupid rule.
Yeah this is absolutely necessary in a lot of cases, not sure how you can work with a database while following this rule
What happened?