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Group projects can be so frustrating

GodlessAstronomer

GodlessAstronomer

Lifer
I'm working on my capstone project and the horrors of group work are flooding back in. Despite the fact that I'm contributing over half of all of the code to the project (in a 6 person team), every time I ask my team mates to do anything it takes them three times longer than it should and it's almost always WRONG when they check it in. I'm sick of having to comb through every line of their code and spending 3 hours correcting their stupid-ass mistakes every night.

Even when I make an effort to make things easy for them by writing reference implementations they still fuck it up. For example, part of the project involved generating UML diagrams (diagrams of how a piece of software fits together, basically). So we need to implement the various relationships. I write the complete implementation of inheritance relationships and demonstrate to the group how they work. I send a group member away to do the same thing for implementation relationships, and her resulting model is so radically different from my code that it's unusable on our model. I basically need to rewrite it from scratch. FFFFFUUUUUUU.... I FUCKING WROTE AN IMPLEMENTATION OF AN ALMOST IDENTICAL MODEL AND YOU STILL FUCK IT UP! WHAT THE FUCK?

Not to mention bizarre lines of code like
Code: 
relationship = relationship==null ? relationship : new Relationship()
This shit belongs on http://thedailywtf.com/ I swear.

And today was meant to be my day off D:

/weakassrant
 
People like that lower the quality of your degree. Think to yourself, GodlessAstronomer: do I want to have these fools going into job interviews? Do I want to have these fools entering the workforce, proudly displaying their diplomas from my school? Do I want to be associated with fools? If the answer is no, then your course of action should be clear. Stop being such a pussy, GodlessAstronomer. It's time for you to stand up and fight. Fight for the integrity of your degree. Fight.
 
theflyingpig said:
People like that lower the quality of your degree. Think to yourself, GodlessAstronomer: do I want to have these fools going into job interviews? Do I want to have these fools entering the workforce, proudly displaying their diplomas from my school? Do I want to be associated with fools? If the answer is no, then your course of action should be clear. Stop being such a pussy, GodlessAstronomer. It's time for you to stand up and fight. Fight for the integrity of your degree. Fight.
Click to expand...

Wow no mention of murder, torture or rape? Tsk, tsk TFP I'm disappointed.
 
Hmm. Once, a group-member asked for help on one of her homework assignments. It was a simple compound interest calculator using VB.NET.

"There are two equations on the homework instructions--I can't figure out which one to use!"

Perplexed, I took a look myself. These were the two "equations" in question (one is an expression):

FV = PV (1 + i)^n
CInt(5) + CInt(3) = CDbl(8)

I played nice (because I knew I'd be working with her the rest of the semester) and simply told her to use the first one. I then made a mental note not to give her any responsibilities on the actual project. Keep in mind this was junior year of college (I'm a senior now), and since she's in my major, she probably already has a job lined up making 50k+.

Edit: Much later in the year, she asked me how to test if a program of hers worked. Unsure of what she was asking, I told her to compile it and click the button on the GUI she made, and see if it did what it was supposed to. She thanked me, and I was left wondering how she made it past the mandatory Java & VBA prerequisites before this one.
 
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God damn I HATE group work. Like you I usually end up being the one to do most of the work. Not trying to brag here, in these group projects there's inevitably always someone who does like 80% of the work and the rest just ride their coat tails. Course my hatred of groups could have something to do with my social phobia as well.
 
theflyingpig said:
People like that lower the quality of your degree. Think to yourself, GodlessAstronomer: do I want to have these fools going into job interviews? Do I want to have these fools entering the workforce, proudly displaying their diplomas from my school? Do I want to be associated with fools? If the answer is no, then your course of action should be clear. Stop being such a pussy, GodlessAstronomer. It's time for you to stand up and fight. Fight for the integrity of your degree. Fight.
Click to expand...

Everyone knows this
 
Group work in capstone projects can be dreary, but they do reflect what you'll see once you get a real job. You are going to most likely work in a group setting with others, and the group interaction is an important learning experience. You're going to run into people you don't want to work with etc. That's what its all about.
 
Indeed. I'm having a hell of a time with my senior design project. Terrible group, I've had to take control (not really my usual plan of action) in the past few weeks just to make sure it gets done. Probably done 85% of the work in a group of 4.
 
understand...in the same position...thinking about telling them they are all idiots and I would be better off to do it myself.

Simple project that should have only taken a week or two but these dickheads are so goddamn dumb they are taking a simple idea and complicating the shit out it.

We had the option to do an individual or group project....christ, why didn't I listen to my instincts and vote for an individual project?
 
GodlessAstronomer said:
I'm working on my capstone project and the horrors of group work are flooding back in. Despite the fact that I'm contributing over half of all of the code to the project (in a 6 person team)
Click to expand...

Sounds familiar. For an eight month research project I had to do in the final year of chemistry, I was in a group of 4 people. About half way through, 2 of the people left the group and took their work with them (documentation about things we did). One got married and moved across the country without giving us any contact information, so we had to re-do all of her work. Another one went back to Malaysia and took his work with him, so we had to redo that as well.

edit.
I forgot to mention that those two people fucked up some of the previous classes and didn't fully understand what we were doing. Malaysia guy failed spectroscopy in the previous semester, so he didn't understand why I was using FTIR to analyze hazelnut oil and he didn't understand why I was looking for a peak in a very specific region. The woman who got married all around sucked at analytical chemistry; she didn't understand spectroscopy or gas chromatography. I ran the entire spectroscopy part of the research project while the other smart person in the group ran the gas chromatography part of the project. Those two things together account for probably 90% of what we were doing. The other 2 people often wouldn't show up for research lab time because they would be stuck doing lame stuff like cracking nuts and extracting oil. This is what happens when you suck at chemistry - instead of running the instrument, you crack hazelnuts.


I can't remember what it's called but there's a name for when adding more people to the team actually slows the team down.


Perplexed, I took a look myself. These were the two "equations" in question (one is an expression):

FV = PV (1 + i)^n
CInt(5) + CInt(3) = CDbl(8)
Click to expand...
What's the difference between equation and expression?
 
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daishi5 said:
ShawnD1, I think you mean the mythical man month, but I had only heard of that in software projects.
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That sounds about right. The first paragraph on the wiki page goes to Brook's Law

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law
Communication overheads increase as the number of people increases. The number of different communication channels increases along with the square of the number of people; doubling the number of people results in four times as many different conversations. Everyone working on the same task needs to keep in sync, so as more people are added they spend more time trying to find out what everyone else is doing.
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This. There are times where I find that I'm waiting to get information from someone else before I can continue or they are waiting on me for information before they can continue. Example: I can't design your electrical layout until you tell me how much stuff you intend to run. Even if everyone is really trying their best, there's a lot of down time caused by this.
 
theflyingpig said:
People like that lower the quality of your degree. Think to yourself, GodlessAstronomer: do I want to have these fools going into job interviews? Do I want to have these fools entering the workforce, proudly displaying their diplomas from my school? Do I want to be associated with fools? If the answer is no, then your course of action should be clear. Stop being such a pussy, GodlessAstronomer. It's time for you to stand up and fight. Fight for the integrity of your degree. Fight.
Click to expand...

What....everyone does not know that?
 
Well, the majority of people are dumb as rock so group projects will suck.
I prefer to be a lone wolf.
 
I hate them too. I was working on a project with two other guys. One guy and spent a lot of time on it, and the other emailed us some code at midnight that didn't work, no explanation, and a bunch of unknown global variables used. Me and the other guy finished it, and turned it in without his name on it.
 
I fucking hated group projects. On our senior design project I had to work with 3 moron foreign kids, 2 of which could barely speak a goddamn word of english, and one who was passable.

My friend and I basically did the entire project. If we asked them to do even the most mundane task they would f it up, so we just didn't use any of their work.

Most of it was complete broken english anyway. The only time what they "wrote" made sense, was when they copy and pasted word-for-word what was on the website they found it on. I caught their plagiarism because I was so astounded at the excerpts that made sense that I thought there had to be something fishy about it.
 
Try doing on with 4 other Chinese students whose language skills are very questionable and are hardwired not to think outside the box. Then having them write a big report and you seeing it the night before it's due and realise the english in the report is terrible. Thus you spend the next 5 hours rewriting the report to actually make sense.

How these people can gain degrees in English speaking countries is beyond me, but money talks right?
 
onlyCOpunk said:
Try doing on with 4 other Chinese students whose language skills are very questionable and are hardwired not to think outside the box. Then having them write a big report and you seeing it the night before it's due and realise the english in the report is terrible. Thus you spend the next 5 hours rewriting the report to actually make sense.

How these people can gain degrees in English speaking countries is beyond me, but money talks right?
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Well it depends on the degree certainly but my own experience is that on average foreign students are better educated than students here. That's no to say their English is any good necessarily. I feel for your situation but I know for a fact that many a foreign student who couldn't speak much English were right at the top of the class and it had everything to do with better education and work ethics.
 
Yea it is annoying... Finished my capstone last quarter. While it wasn't anywhere near as good as it could have been, we did get through it without hating each other, so that's cool, I suppose.
 
Yeah... group projects blow. You always get stuck with at least one person who doesn't contribute any work at all, and another person who's contribution is so bad that they bring down the quality of the entire project.

In other words, it's just like many of the real life projects you'll work on. 🙂

I found that it was always best to pair up with the adult commuter students if possible. Those people usually don't screw around, and want a high of a GPA as possible so they can quit the shit job they have now and get a better position!
 
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