Plagiarism

I was working at Microsoft on the Word development team. We needed another developer on the team so we started interviewing. One candidate was from the an overseas university and had a stellar resume. I mean her resume floated a few inches above my desk and hummed every time I looked at it. She looked to be a great fit for my team. When I met her we went through a few “welcome” questions. I then asked her to write the code to find the length of a string. This, of course, is a function that you should be able to write today. Unfortunately, this interview candidate had no idea where to begin. “Well,” I thought, “I got 56 minutes of a one hour interview to kill.” I started asking her about her flight, what she thinks of the weather, and her favorite types of food. I mean, I was really struggling with things to talk with her about. Finally, she asked “this interview is not going the way I expect.” To this I replied, “That is right! We write code here and you can’t!” She protested, “But my resume says I can write code.” I replied, “Well, your resume is a lie. I can give you another coding problem, but I don’t think you will do any better.”

The worst thing I could have done for this girl was to give her the job. She would get fired in a few months and it would be much more painful than sending her back home after this interview. That is the way things go in situations like this. The longer you put off the inevitable, the worse it gets. What should have happened is that she shouldn’t have graduated. Better yet, someone should have failed her in a class long ago. Perhaps she lied on her resume. Perhaps someone did her a “favor” by passing her when she did not deserve it. Perhaps she cheated! Whatever the case, it would have been much less painful for her to have been caught years ago rather than in my office that Tuesday morning.

It may seem like you are jumping through hoops to pass this class or graduate. This is not true! You are here to learn valuable skills that will be essential in the workplace. If you cheat in class, you are only digging a huge hole for yourself that will be difficult to climb out of. In the end, you are only cheating yourself. You need to learn marketable skills regardless of what your grades say and regardless of what your professor does. It is completely up to you!

One final thought. Imagine that you have graduated, got a great job, have a wonderful spouse and family, and just signed mortgage on a new house. You walk through the front door one evening and tell your spouse, “My life is a lie. I don’t actually have any skills because I cheated/lied in college. I just got fired because my manager found out but, don’t worry, I got another job at Burger King.” You need to do everything in your power today to make sure you do not have to say that to your spouse.