8
kiyan
4y

TLDR; College group projects suck, not because the work, but the people in your group will make or break you. Fuck having 1 week to do this assignment.

Sometimes working with other students on group projects is great, they actually know how to create a merge a git branch. I've had a decent partner once during my 3 years at university so far. This last project takes the cake on idiots I've worked with...so far at least... It was me and two others, we'll call them Thing1 and Thing2 for now. Anyway so the 3 of us had a week to implement a very rudimentary Invoice system; fine, easy enough. We divided up the work and 'started'.
All seemed to be going well, no complaints or cries for help all week. Until 4 hours before we submit the assignment; Thing 1 sends me a DM saying all of Thing 1's work is useless full of bugs and just shouldn't be integrated with the rest of the code. Umm fine? I guess? wtf?! why did this have to come out last minute?! We could have explained to Thing 1 what's going on and gotten him/her up to speed on everything. Believe it or not, I was sorta ok with this? I mean thing 1 hadn't pushed anything to the repo yet. I mean literally nada, Thing 1 is a collaborator on the repo that has contributed nothing. Seeing as how Thing 1 was contributing nothing I had already started to cover our ass a began Thing 1's work.
That's not even what's pissed me off... at least thing 1 had the gall to message me to say "idk..wtf is going on...continue without me". Thing 2 arguably made my time with the project worse. His code was nothing but garbage...every time...literally spent more time deciphering his incoherent bullshit more than I did rewriting his mess. I shit you not he wrote out this method, and tells the group he's "finally got it fixed and working":
public static float updateTotal(float newValue)
{
total = updateTotal(newValue);
return total;
}

How tf did he test this to see if its working?! I'm a novice and can already see the infinite loop here. You called your method within that method's own definition, what did you expect to happen.
I managed to get things 75% working and turned in 5 mins before the cut off.
Thankfully Thing 1 emailed the Proff as well, hopefully he won't tank my grade too bad. I'm so glad to be done with this assignment, fingers crossed there's no more group work.

Comments
  • 3
    Yeah, sometimes working with people is infuriating. Pretty much everyone at university had some such dumbshit on their team at some point.

    You should take some value from this though. Chances are, you will be on a team after you graduate. So learn communication and project management. People did not push anything to your repo - and you didn't ask.

    You're right, it is their job to ask for help if they need it, but it is in your interest that the project completes, so if you are not convinced - ask, be proactive. Same with repo. Divide and conquer small tasks. You guys just divided your shit by three, then everyone sat on their small little island and had no idea what the rest is doing, even though you at least pushed to the repo.

    TL;DR

    Group projects suck, but draw some value from this experience. Communicate, manage.
  • 1
    @Maer Thanks, I really appreciate your insight on this!
  • 0
    @kiyan Sure, you're welcome. :)
  • 0
    Can you pick the people in your group? I had a group of friends in uni and we did all of our projects together. They were awesome and reliable. We divided projects according to each other's strengths and finishing them was easy.
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