[rcfox]

When I was in university, I scraped an internal job postings site for students to find internships. The site was terrible- each job description would load in a pop-up window controlled by Javascript, and loading a second description would override the first. It was also really slow and had limited filtering. My version could load job descriptions in new tabs, presented the table on a single page, and you could mark jobs that you weren't interested in or had already applied to.

The university didn't take kindly to that. They accused me of trying to take down the co-op system and threatened to sue me for copyright infringement. Since I linked into their system for job descriptions, I was able to show that the data I actually had (company, title, location) wasn't creative work and therefore not copyrightable. I also had some friends in the university faculty and staff who spoke up for me, since I had reported security vulnerabilities in the past, indicating that I wasn't acting with malicious intent. In the end, I just had to take a business ethics course, which I probably would have taken anyway.

[rjmunro]

So you made a tool to make life easier for you and your fellow students, and rather than congratulating you they threatened to sue?

[lupire]

Yes, that's how institutions operate. Seeing Like a State is the classic text on the subject.

[polio]

Sounds like WaterlooWorks.

[karlding]

To me, it sounds more like the old system that WaterlooWorks replaced (JobMine). JobMine was just Oracle/PeopleSoft's PeopleTools under the hood.

Some of my friends who graduated earlier told stories about how JobMine at one point accepted resumes in HTML. Of course, this also meant that it was vulnerable to XSS attacks. The eventual fix was just to only allow PDF resumes.

[polio]

Yeah, you're right. I was blanking on the name of the predecessor.

[rcfox]

Haha, it was JobMine!

[evandale]

Right from your first sentence I was thinking "I bet this is JobMine"

It still blows me away a school filled with CS people had such a god-awful system. Then again we are CS people and not UI/UX designers.

[AyyWS]

I worked with a guy who was previously a big state university buyer/administrator. He said that Oracle charged around 1% of retail prices to the university.

[edgyquant]

I did “information security” at a community college and learned I could find sites just by googling answers. These sites were behind a paywall after the first few answers but if you viewed the source you see them.

So I wrote a python/selenium script to search google and dump all of these answers for my weekly homework. Then I’d bang out all of my classes in a few minutes.

I knew just enough about networks, security and building computers from my childhood I never got worse than a C on a test.

[mlex]

JobMine Plus?

[rcfox]

It looks like JobMine Plus is a project that started after I graduated. From what I gather, the university cancelled their own JobMine replacement project around that time and finally relented in letting students take a shot at improving things.