Caution: Does Not Play Well With Others
Collaborating on a team can be a great boost to productivity. Sometimes not so much.
Here at RIT they put a big emphasis through all of our coursework on working in teams and being able to cooperate with others. Now I perfectly understand this mentality. It’s great when you can find people who compliments your skill-set and then being able to produce a better product or project together.
With that said, I HATE WORKING IN GROUPS. I have had three major group projects so far and I always seem to get group members who either have misplaced their brain entirely, or just haven’t read the manual yet on how to use it.
The worst is having group members who don’t yet understand or appreciate the advantage of planning, especially for teamwork. They want to forgo planning and design and just code. So when they jump into the coding they get lost and are unsure of what to do. So they just get it to work in a hodged-podged format instead of properly.
The second most aggravating part of working with others is working with people who have no sense of style standards. Despite declaring a standard for the team right from the bat I’d get code contributions from team members that is not compliant to the standard, let alone commented and readable for other people.
The one thing that I wish my professors put more emphasis on, instead of being nice all the time, is style and readability in code work. Too many times I’ve seen professors who will be like “Well, it works.” and give the credit for the work instead of fixing the issue.
The world would be better if everyone coded the same way and with the same style. Oh what a world that would be.