Aside from various other issues on which people have remarked, one thing that hasn’t been pointed out so far is the problem with college projects: they’re too damn small.
For every project, there is a good range of team sizes, large enough for many hands make light work, but not large enough for too many cooks spoil the broth (where you start having to split it up so finely that coordination overhead swamps the actual project work—see Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, for a classic discussion of this).
I remember one college project I had, we were supposed to do it in teams of four. Problem was, like other college projects, it was comfortably sized for one person, a moderately tight squeeze for two; four people was an insane glut. Solution: the two best programmers in our team did the project, the other two paid for our beer for an evening.
Now you say “all of a sudden, foom!, my part of the project is done because one of the girls was bored on the weekend and had nothing better to do. (Huh? When does this ever happen?)”
Well the answer is, it doesn’t happen often in real life, because it’s a symptom of a project much too small for the team size, or equivalently a massive glut of manpower for the project size—in real life, you have a to-do list stretching to somewhere around the middle of the next century, that grows by two items for every one item you knock off, and a desperate shortage of skilled people to do the work.
So while teamwork is important in real life, and many issues thereof do arise, that particular problem is mostly endemic to college projects.
At UMCP, they have a program called Gemstone that I was in for ~2 years; the idea was to take a group of >10 undergraduates and have them complete a real research project over the course of 4 years. Apparently, they’ve learned from their high attrition rate and now try to ward away bad matches.
They didn’t have the size problem- many projects were too big, and got seriously scaled down. The same interpersonal issues were present; the same priority problems were present. Having too little work may be a sufficient condition, but it’s by no means necessary.
That seems quite plausible. I work part-time in an institute for real medical research, and all of the full-time employees are swamped. All the time. They may or may not have teamwork problems for other reasons, but they certainly don’t have this problem.
Aside from various other issues on which people have remarked, one thing that hasn’t been pointed out so far is the problem with college projects: they’re too damn small.
For every project, there is a good range of team sizes, large enough for many hands make light work, but not large enough for too many cooks spoil the broth (where you start having to split it up so finely that coordination overhead swamps the actual project work—see Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, for a classic discussion of this).
I remember one college project I had, we were supposed to do it in teams of four. Problem was, like other college projects, it was comfortably sized for one person, a moderately tight squeeze for two; four people was an insane glut. Solution: the two best programmers in our team did the project, the other two paid for our beer for an evening.
Now you say “all of a sudden, foom!, my part of the project is done because one of the girls was bored on the weekend and had nothing better to do. (Huh? When does this ever happen?)”
Well the answer is, it doesn’t happen often in real life, because it’s a symptom of a project much too small for the team size, or equivalently a massive glut of manpower for the project size—in real life, you have a to-do list stretching to somewhere around the middle of the next century, that grows by two items for every one item you knock off, and a desperate shortage of skilled people to do the work.
So while teamwork is important in real life, and many issues thereof do arise, that particular problem is mostly endemic to college projects.
At UMCP, they have a program called Gemstone that I was in for ~2 years; the idea was to take a group of >10 undergraduates and have them complete a real research project over the course of 4 years. Apparently, they’ve learned from their high attrition rate and now try to ward away bad matches.
They didn’t have the size problem- many projects were too big, and got seriously scaled down. The same interpersonal issues were present; the same priority problems were present. Having too little work may be a sufficient condition, but it’s by no means necessary.
That seems quite plausible. I work part-time in an institute for real medical research, and all of the full-time employees are swamped. All the time. They may or may not have teamwork problems for other reasons, but they certainly don’t have this problem.