begin quoting Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade as of Mon, Mar 05, 2007 at 10:00:42AM -0800: > On Mar 4, 2007, at 7:43 PM, Stewart Stremler wrote: > > >Lesson #2 - if you don't have good people on your team, it's going > >to suck, and picking up another's slack is more work than going at > >it alone, and you're going to hate it. > > This was, by far, the most painful part of some of my classes. > > This was back in '98, as the rushing sound made by the dot-com bubble > was filling everyone's ears, and complete idiots were managing to > muddle through CS courses and get to the upper-division classes, > simply out of their desire to cash in.
I had the misfortune of learning that lesson late. I had managed to hook up with a _good_ group when I started getting into classes that had "team projects", and it was a joy. We had one project where it was due on tuesday[1], and there were three of us in the team. One member was going to Napa that weekend, so he turned over his code to us on Thursday. The professor was astonished: "You're going to let him go?! But you haven't integrated yet!" -- the remaining partner and I just said "Yup." and bid the third member to have a good trip. And, indeed, we had no problems, and our code was amazing, wonderful, fast, small, elegant, and all manner of excellent things. This was, I later learned, an anomaly in the student academic environment. I tried this sort of partition-by-interface-and-behavior later, with a different group, and it fell very, very, very flat. The professor was wise, even if in that one case his concerns were not applicable. [1] details may be fuzzy, but the essence of the story is correct enough. -- How trusting we can be. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
