As you say, getting things to happen takes a lot of time and effort, which is one of the things I learned when working on group projects in school. I think that most people, when they realize just how much effort it takes to Get Stuff Done, usually end up saying “screw it, there are other things I’d rather be doing” and go on doing whatever it is that they were doing before.
Thing is, getting things to happen doesn’t actually take a LOT of time and effort (depending on what you’re trying to make happen.). The difference between something happening and not can be as simple as making a facebook event and inviting a bunch of people. The key is that someone has to take responsibility, however little or however much effort that is, to say “I will be the one to try and make this happen” instead of saying “Man this should really be a thing”
Never ask. Asking a bunch of people about that will end up taking forever and have no conclusive answer. Schedule events when convenient for what you think will be multiple people sometime in advance, but with a concrete time and place. People will happily give you input after you do this and you can change it later, but this is much more reliable.
I think the biggest problem with group projects in school is that a) the people you’re working with aren’t pre-filtered for motivation, and b) you’re working on toy problems that, likely, no one in the group would bother to do if it weren’t assigned. Some people want to get 90% because they have a scholarship and need to maintain a certain GPA, but some people are happy just to pass and want to do the minimum of work, and pretty much everyone has the attitude that “it’s just school”.
I’ve had group projects break down both because I was the most motivated person in the group (and lacked the leadership/interpersonal skills to deal with this), and because I was the least motivated person in the group (I’m somewhat spoiled and used to getting As without putting in too much time, and I was not prepared to have 3-hour group meetings starting at 8 pm after class.)
In general, I would expect group projects to run more smoothly in the workplace, both because people are more motivated–they’re in their chosen field, they’re getting paid, they’re working on a real world problem, etc–and because the process of getting hired filters for interpersonal skills, which isn’t the case for getting accepted into college or university, so you’re less likely to end up with people who can’t work with other people.
Grade school didn’t assign me many group projects. In fact, I can only remember one. And on that one I think I tried cooperating for like 15 minutes or something and then told the other two kids, “Go away, I’ll handle this” because it was easier to just do all the work myself.
Sometimes our early life experiences really are that metaphorical.
Similar, possibly relevant anecdote from my own life:
In a recent computer science class I took, we (the entire class as a whole) were assigned a group project. We were split up into about 4 sub-groups of about 6 people each; each sub-group was assigned a part of the project. I was on the team that was responsible for drawing up specifications, coordinating the other groups, testing the parts, and assembling them into a whole.
Like Eliezer, I quickly realized that I could just write the whole thing myself (it was a little toy C++ program). And I did (it took maybe a couple of days). However, the professor was (of course) not willing to simply let me submit a complete project which I had written in its entirety; and since the groups were separated, there was no way for me to submit my work in a way that would plausibly let me claim that any sort of cooperation had taken place.
So I had to spend the rest of the semester trying to get the other groups to independently write the code that I had already written, trying to get them to see that the solutions I’d come up with were in fact working ones, and generally having conversations like the following:
Clueless Classmate: How should we do this? Perhaps ?
SaidAchmiz: Mmm… perhaps we might instead try .
CC: That doesn’t make any sense and will never work!
SA: Sigh.
I’m not quite sure what this could be a metaphor for, but it certainly felt rather metaphorical at the time...
My question is: are there some straightforward heuristics one can apply to find/select a workplace where such things occur as little as possible? At what kinds of places can one expect more of this, and at what kinds less? The effort to find a workplace where you do NOT have to handle such situations seems like it would be more effective in the long run (edit: that is, more effective in achieving happiness/sanity/job satisfaction) than learning to deal with said situations (though of course those things are not mutually exclusive!).
My question is: are there some straightforward heuristics one can apply to find/select a workplace where such things occur as little as possible? At what kinds of places can one expect more of this, and at what kinds less?
Yes, and it is an extremely high expected-value decision to actively seek out people who understand which workplaces are likely to be most suitable according to this and other important metrics.
Grade school didn’t assign me many group projects. In fact, I can only remember one. And on that one I think I tried cooperating for like 15 minutes or something and then told the other two kids, “Go away, I’ll handle this” because it was easier to just do all the work myself.
Sometimes our early life experiences really are that metaphorical.
And sometimes they aren’t. As a ‘grown up’ you outright founded (with assistance) an organisation to help you handle your new project as well as playing a pivotal role in forming a community around a relevant area of interest. Congratulations are in order for learning to transcend the “just do myself” instinct—at least for the big things, when it matters.
It seems to me that “selecting people with whom I can usefully cooperate” is different from “learning to cooperate with arbitrarily assigned people”. Do you think that captures the distinction between Eliezer’s grade school anecdote and his later successes, or is that not a meaningful difference?
It seems to me that “selecting people with whom I can usefully cooperate” is different from “learning to cooperate with arbitrarily assigned people”. Do you think that captures the distinction between Eliezer’s grade school anecdote and his later successes
It is certainly a significant factor. (Not the only one. Eliezer is also wiser as an adult than he was as a child.)
Math over metaphor. This is a common experience. Assume a child 99th percentile of age group by intelligence
Elementary school is assigned by geography, so average intelligence is 50th percentile (or fairly close)
By middle school there may not be general tracking for all students, but very low performers have been tracked off (say 20% of students), so average intelligence is 60th percentile
In high school they often have a high and a low track, split the students 50⁄50 and you get average intelligence is 80th percentile
If the student then goes to a college that rejects 90% of applicants (or gets work in a similar selective profession) average intelligence is 98th percentile
and all of a sudden the student is now well socialized and has learned the important skill of cooperating with their peers.
EDIT: the above holds if you track “effectiveness” which is some combination of conscientiousness and intelligence instead of intelligence. In practice I expect most tracking systems capture quite a bit of conscientiousness, but the above reads more cleanly with intelligence in each line than “some combination of conscientiousness and intelligence”
This is a bit off-topic, but I think that the word “competence” effectively conveys the meaning of, “some combination of conscientiousness and intelligence”.
I was generally lucky with group project partners at school (both high school and college), I guess; I didn’t have much explicit conflict, and I never had one actually fall apart. There was one class in which I was in a group of three in which I did 95% of the work, one of the other two people did about 60% of the work, and the third guy basically didn’t show up, but I was okay with that. I wrote code that worked, the second guy supported me so I could write that code, and the third guy would have only gotten in the way anyway.
Edit: (Yes, that adds up to more than 100%, because of duplication of effort, inefficiency, correcting each other’s mistakes, etc. In other words, it’s a joke, along the lines of “First you do the first 80%, then you do the second 80%.”)
I interpreted that as “I did 95% of the work that I said I would do, and one of the other partners did 60% of the work that he committed to do, and the third partner didn’t do anything.” But yeah, if you interpret it as straight-up percentages, it doesn’t really add up...
I could’ve sworn there was a bit in the grandparent that acknowledged this apparent contradiction, and pointed out pair programming as the explanation, but it seems to be gone. That would, in any case, account for the percentages.
Out of curiosity, am I the only one who had experienced at least some instances of productive group work in high school and college ? I am not nearly as smart as most people here, so perhaps that fact played a role, since I actually needed the cooperation of other people in order to get the job done.
As you say, getting things to happen takes a lot of time and effort, which is one of the things I learned when working on group projects in school. I think that most people, when they realize just how much effort it takes to Get Stuff Done, usually end up saying “screw it, there are other things I’d rather be doing” and go on doing whatever it is that they were doing before.
Thing is, getting things to happen doesn’t actually take a LOT of time and effort (depending on what you’re trying to make happen.). The difference between something happening and not can be as simple as making a facebook event and inviting a bunch of people. The key is that someone has to take responsibility, however little or however much effort that is, to say “I will be the one to try and make this happen” instead of saying “Man this should really be a thing”
It’s the old “herding cats” problem—finding a time and place that you can get enough people to show up at is hard.
Never ask. Asking a bunch of people about that will end up taking forever and have no conclusive answer. Schedule events when convenient for what you think will be multiple people sometime in advance, but with a concrete time and place. People will happily give you input after you do this and you can change it later, but this is much more reliable.
The beauty of defaults: the default to an open question is to ignore or not act, the default to an announcement of a date is to think about it.
I think the biggest problem with group projects in school is that a) the people you’re working with aren’t pre-filtered for motivation, and b) you’re working on toy problems that, likely, no one in the group would bother to do if it weren’t assigned. Some people want to get 90% because they have a scholarship and need to maintain a certain GPA, but some people are happy just to pass and want to do the minimum of work, and pretty much everyone has the attitude that “it’s just school”.
I’ve had group projects break down both because I was the most motivated person in the group (and lacked the leadership/interpersonal skills to deal with this), and because I was the least motivated person in the group (I’m somewhat spoiled and used to getting As without putting in too much time, and I was not prepared to have 3-hour group meetings starting at 8 pm after class.)
In general, I would expect group projects to run more smoothly in the workplace, both because people are more motivated–they’re in their chosen field, they’re getting paid, they’re working on a real world problem, etc–and because the process of getting hired filters for interpersonal skills, which isn’t the case for getting accepted into college or university, so you’re less likely to end up with people who can’t work with other people.
Grade school didn’t assign me many group projects. In fact, I can only remember one. And on that one I think I tried cooperating for like 15 minutes or something and then told the other two kids, “Go away, I’ll handle this” because it was easier to just do all the work myself.
Sometimes our early life experiences really are that metaphorical.
Similar, possibly relevant anecdote from my own life:
In a recent computer science class I took, we (the entire class as a whole) were assigned a group project. We were split up into about 4 sub-groups of about 6 people each; each sub-group was assigned a part of the project. I was on the team that was responsible for drawing up specifications, coordinating the other groups, testing the parts, and assembling them into a whole.
Like Eliezer, I quickly realized that I could just write the whole thing myself (it was a little toy C++ program). And I did (it took maybe a couple of days). However, the professor was (of course) not willing to simply let me submit a complete project which I had written in its entirety; and since the groups were separated, there was no way for me to submit my work in a way that would plausibly let me claim that any sort of cooperation had taken place.
So I had to spend the rest of the semester trying to get the other groups to independently write the code that I had already written, trying to get them to see that the solutions I’d come up with were in fact working ones, and generally having conversations like the following:
Clueless Classmate: How should we do this? Perhaps ?
SaidAchmiz: Mmm… perhaps we might instead try .
CC: That doesn’t make any sense and will never work!
SA: Sigh.
I’m not quite sure what this could be a metaphor for, but it certainly felt rather metaphorical at the time...
It sounds like a metaphor for “what you need to learn to handle effectively in order to succeed in a typical workplace”. Good luck!
My question is: are there some straightforward heuristics one can apply to find/select a workplace where such things occur as little as possible? At what kinds of places can one expect more of this, and at what kinds less? The effort to find a workplace where you do NOT have to handle such situations seems like it would be more effective in the long run (edit: that is, more effective in achieving happiness/sanity/job satisfaction) than learning to deal with said situations (though of course those things are not mutually exclusive!).
Yes, and it is an extremely high expected-value decision to actively seek out people who understand which workplaces are likely to be most suitable according to this and other important metrics.
And sometimes they aren’t. As a ‘grown up’ you outright founded (with assistance) an organisation to help you handle your new project as well as playing a pivotal role in forming a community around a relevant area of interest. Congratulations are in order for learning to transcend the “just do myself” instinct—at least for the big things, when it matters.
It seems to me that “selecting people with whom I can usefully cooperate” is different from “learning to cooperate with arbitrarily assigned people”. Do you think that captures the distinction between Eliezer’s grade school anecdote and his later successes, or is that not a meaningful difference?
It is certainly a significant factor. (Not the only one. Eliezer is also wiser as an adult than he was as a child.)
Math over metaphor. This is a common experience. Assume a child 99th percentile of age group by intelligence
Elementary school is assigned by geography, so average intelligence is 50th percentile (or fairly close)
By middle school there may not be general tracking for all students, but very low performers have been tracked off (say 20% of students), so average intelligence is 60th percentile
In high school they often have a high and a low track, split the students 50⁄50 and you get average intelligence is 80th percentile
If the student then goes to a college that rejects 90% of applicants (or gets work in a similar selective profession) average intelligence is 98th percentile
and all of a sudden the student is now well socialized and has learned the important skill of cooperating with their peers.
EDIT: the above holds if you track “effectiveness” which is some combination of conscientiousness and intelligence instead of intelligence. In practice I expect most tracking systems capture quite a bit of conscientiousness, but the above reads more cleanly with intelligence in each line than “some combination of conscientiousness and intelligence”
This is a bit off-topic, but I think that the word “competence” effectively conveys the meaning of, “some combination of conscientiousness and intelligence”.
I was generally lucky with group project partners at school (both high school and college), I guess; I didn’t have much explicit conflict, and I never had one actually fall apart. There was one class in which I was in a group of three in which I did 95% of the work, one of the other two people did about 60% of the work, and the third guy basically didn’t show up, but I was okay with that. I wrote code that worked, the second guy supported me so I could write that code, and the third guy would have only gotten in the way anyway.
Edit: (Yes, that adds up to more than 100%, because of duplication of effort, inefficiency, correcting each other’s mistakes, etc. In other words, it’s a joke, along the lines of “First you do the first 80%, then you do the second 80%.”)
...?
I interpreted that as “I did 95% of the work that I said I would do, and one of the other partners did 60% of the work that he committed to do, and the third partner didn’t do anything.” But yeah, if you interpret it as straight-up percentages, it doesn’t really add up...
I read it as CronoDAS implying his group did 55% more work than it needed to, but your interpretation makes as much sense.
I could’ve sworn there was a bit in the grandparent that acknowledged this apparent contradiction, and pointed out pair programming as the explanation, but it seems to be gone. That would, in any case, account for the percentages.
Yeah, I don’t know what happened to that paragraph.
Out of curiosity, am I the only one who had experienced at least some instances of productive group work in high school and college ? I am not nearly as smart as most people here, so perhaps that fact played a role, since I actually needed the cooperation of other people in order to get the job done.