Journey to a PhD – Page 6 – The Renegade Coder

Everyone remembers what it was like the first time they had to work in a group for a consequential project. Maybe you had a group presentation in high school, or perhaps you had to pitch an idea at your first job. Whatever the case, you probably had a bad time. But, why? That's why I want to talk about working in teams today. Working in Teams To be honest, I don't really remember my first team project, but I do remember some of the worst. Before we get into why working in teams can be frustrating, let me share some of my worst experiences. The Dropout When I started my undergrad, I thought it would be fun to get an engineering degree. Unfortunately, I really had no idea what I was doing, so I made a lot of mistakes along the way. For instance, somehow I found myself in a compilers class in just my third semester. According to the syllabus, we had to write a compiler by the end of the course. As someone with nothing more than some basic Java and data structures knowledge at the time, I struggled quite a bit. To make matters worse, it was only my second time working with a partner and my first time working with a partner on a term project. There was nothing really wrong with working with this person, but they didn't exactly make my life any easier. In fact, they didn't help at all. Near the deadline of the first part of the compiler, I reached out to my partner to see if they wanted to meet. To my surprise, they had dropped the class, and they didn't even bother to tell me until I asked. And, that wasn't the first time that happened to me. Who does that?! Compiler Hero Obviously, my experience with that partner didn't exactly leave a good taste in my mouth, and my experiences moving forward didn't change my mind. In fact, the partner I found just after the dropout was arguably worse. The fill in partner was what folks might call a deadline hero. They didn't exactly care to engage in a project until just before the due date. Maybe the pressure helped them get work done, but it didn't aid in my mental health. As a result, I spent most of that semester writing the compiler, learning git, and experimenting with json all by myself. To be honest, I don't remember if my partner did anything. To make matters worse, they thought because we were "friends" they could approach me about other assignments and courses for help. As if dealing with them as a partner wasn't bad enough, I had to deflect their attempts to harass me for homework help. Repeat Lab Partner After that semester, I went abroad to take a bunch of general education courses, so I didn't have to deal with partners for a bit. However, as soon as I got back, I found myself in a digital system lab where my only ally was the exact same partner I had in compilers. Needless to say, I spent a large portion of that semester spending late nights in the lab alone. In fact, that was one of the more miserable semesters of my college experience. For whatever reason, that lab was only 2 credits, but I probably spent 20 hours a week grinding away on projects. On one particular occasion, I remember it being so cold that they had to cancel school, and I took that opportunity to trek across campus to work on the lab. I even remember going to the lab on my birthday just to get some work done. It's probably no surprise that my family reacted a bit awkwardly when they called at 6PM, and I was on my way to the lab. It was in this exact lab that I decided that I didn't like hardware. After all, one of the labs asked us to build a circuit composed of a low-pass filter and a high-pass filter. Low frequencies were supposed to be output by a motor, but I couldn't even get the damn thing to spin. After countless hours of tinkering with code and suffering through 10-minute compile times, I decided to pass some current straight to the motor. Turns out, it was burnt out. Through all the pain and suffering, I don't remember my partner doing much of anything except hovering over my shoulder as I tweaked individual lines of Verilog code. By the end of the semester, I was burnt out of teammates. Game Development Part One Toward the end of my undergrad, I thought it would be fun to get involved in some game development, so I took two courses. Both of which had team components which weren't that great. The first course was like an intro to Unity with a small group project at the end. In this case, small refers both to the size of the group and the size of the project. If you read my GitHub Graveyard article, you may already know which project I'm talking about. It was called It Takes a Village, and it was supposed to be a therapy game. At a high level, it was essentially a resource collection game like Farmville. Since the project was so small, there wasn't a ton of work to be done on it. In fact, it was nearly impossible to split ourselves into roles. I had a lot of trouble trying to get a task to work on that semester, but somehow I found myself responsible for data persistence. Of course, as often happens in teams, you end up taking on many roles. For instance, take a look at the list of pull requests. Somehow, I found myself writing code for camera locking, game exiting, and splash screen beautifying. All that said, I don't have much to complain about with this team. We had great leadership. We just didn't have the best communication. Overall, I was starting to feel better about working in teams. Game Development Part Two Near the end of my undergrad, I decided to take another stab at game development. In particular, I took a fun collaborative game development course where the entire goal was to develop a game by the end of the semester. The demographics for this course were interesting as about half of the students were from the Art school while the rest of us were in Computer Science. In total, there were about 60 students who were split into three teams. As you can imagine, a 20-person team was nearly impossible to manage. For the sake of time, I won't go into the details about how the course was structured, who do what on our team, and what we were asked to do each week. In fact, I won't even go into what kind of game we made. Just be aware that the entire game was built at the hands of about three developers, a manager, and a handful of artists. In general, our manager was great. They handled all the task assignment related work as well as GitHub merges, presentations, and papers. Meanwhile, our artists did an amazing job of writing the story line and matching style on graphics. Unfortunately, the developer end wasn't as impressive. Of the 10 or so programmers, only 6 of them managed to even make a contribution: As you can see, I finished the semester second in commits, but I was one of the most consistent team members. After all, I had to be as I was assigned to the front end, and people like to see regular progress. Meanwhile, one of my friends wrote the entire backend, and another friend became a bit of a deadline hero. Beyond that, no one really did anything. In fact, at one point I remember completely rewriting our grid generation code because someone decided to place 100 tiles into the scene by hand. I'd love to spend some time chatting about that, but I have too much to write already. Perhaps I'll share that story in another article. Camera Systems When I left college and started working, my experience with teams didn't exactly get better. In fact, in my very first role, I was dramatically undervalued. I ended up spending a large portion of my six months working on nothing projects which gave me a lot of free time to learn other things like how to do taxes. Right as I was about to change roles, they decided to suddenly include me on one of their toughest projects. This was a project that they refused to expose me to until the very moment when I could cause the most harm. To make matters worse, I ended up getting stuck at the office for a week or so one time as they tried to get their project out the door. I wasn't exactly doing anything as they weren't giving me anything to do, but I felt obligated to be there. As a result, I ended up wasting several evenings just sitting there. When I finally moved on, they called me back to fix up something that they gave me to break just before I left. Fortunately, I knew exactly where to look, but it didn't exactly make me feel great about myself. Prognostics On my second team, my role became significant. In particular, I was the only software engineer on the entire team, so I was responsible for the whole code base. If there was ever anything wrong, you could count on me being stuck at work late and sometimes in some very unfortunate locations. For instance, it wasn't uncommon for my boss to sneak me onto a locomotive, so I could test software. After all, they were very much anti-process, and I almost got into a lot of trouble as a result. Roughly eight months into that role, my boss just straight up quit. At that point, I picked up a new boss who was much more hands-on. Up until that point, I was sort of left to write code on my own. Under the new boss, I was stuck answering riddles on a daily basis. Eventually, I went remote, so daily riddles turned into regular phone calls. Of course, I could rant about that team all day, but I have an entire String of Unfavorable Roles for that. History Repeats Itself Up until now, I had some really negative experiences with working in teams. Regardless of the setting, it seemed like no matter what I was bound to have a frustrating experience. Well, now that I'm back in academia, I've realized that nothing has changed. In fact, I may just have the worst partner ever. Buckle up! Research Project If you've been following along, you probably know that I have an interest in data visualization. As a result, I decided to take a class on it. Unfortunately, I picked the wrong semester to take the course. Instead of taking it with my advisor, I ended up stuck with the other professor that teaches it. For whatever reason, this professor organized the course as a seminar rather than as a regularly structured course. As a result, the first half of the course was front loaded with content. In the span of 8 weeks, we had 4 major projects and a midterm. These were all projects that required some technical background (i.e. knowledge of data viz and libraries like D3) to complete which meant spending hours learning tools and good practices outside of class. Needless to say, I didn't have a lot of free time this semester. While juggling assignments, we also had to form groups for a term project. Within the first 8 weeks, we were stuck having meetings, writing proposals, and presenting ideas without the slightest idea of what we were supposed to be doing. It was very stressful, and I don't do well with being told what to do as it is. Enter: Team Being an eternal optimist can sometimes be stressful. I see the best in people, and they almost always let me down. That's probably why I don't do well in teams. That said, I somehow found myself taking a bet on people I've never met simply because they shared an interest with me: music. From there, I picked up two teammates. Well actually, one considering the other dropped the class without a word within the first two weeks, but I digress. The partner I ended up committing to for the semester was a bit hands on. They were an undergraduate senior getting ready to graduate, and they constantly wanted to meet to "discuss" our project. For the proposal alone, we met twice, but I'll get to that later. As someone who spent the better part of six months working remote for a major company, I can rarely find a reason for holding a meeting. How could I? I currently maintain a rather large open source project with people I've never met, and we've never once held a meeting. If there's confusion, we start an issue, and we hash things out. Why would I ever go out of my way to try to find an appropriate hour for everyone to meet then waste time traveling only to waste half that hour on meta discussion (i.e. should we meet again? where is everyone? should we wait?)? I'll take the asynchronous communication all day. Proposal Meta Meeting At any rate, my partner (let's call him Brian) was tough to work with. To start, he wanted my phone number which is a big red flag for anyone who has a regular job. By handing it over, I was handing over my right to free time, and that's exactly what I did. Right away, I received the following texts: Hey this is [Brian]!~The Tues time next week works for me~Wanna meet before then to come up with ideas / talking points?~I don't have class after data viz for an hour so that time works for meBrian, February 4th, 2019 As previously mentioned, this guy was obsessed with getting together to chat, so we planned to get together to prepare for a meeting. Does anyone else think that's insane? We met, so we would be ready to meet. Over the course of that meeting, I realized that Brian has a rather annoying tick. Anytime you're talking, he fills the empty space with a diverse set of affirmative sound effects: everything from a regular "yeah" to a casual "mhmm" and more. If I wasn't already irritated with his eagerness to get together, his excitement to hear what I had to say was even more annoying. After all, I'm convinced he wasn't even listening to me. He prefers to hear is own voice. To make matters worse, I actually made the mistake of taking us to the same room that I hold office hours, so there were students there looking for help. Obviously, I wasn't going to derail our meeting to help some students, but that didn't stop Brian from doing exactly that. At one point, a student asked Brian if he could help them after he was done helping me. Of course, I found that kind of funny. Not only am I a graduate student but I'm also one of the instructors for the course, so clearly the way Brian was treating me indicated a teacher-student relationship. At any rate, Brian proceeded to waste a solid chunk of my time by helping out this random student for a class he wasn't even teaching. By the end of the meeting, we had barely fleshed out an idea what we wanted to do. Proposal Meeting Later, Brian and I met up with the Data Viz professor and the grader to discuss our proposal. At that point, we just had a rough idea of what we wanted to do, so we ended getting grilled about not picking a research question to answer the entire time. To be honest, I'm not so upset about that. I was more upset about how my partner conducted himself in that meeting. Instead of respectfully agreeing that we needed to work out our ideas, he spent the entire time talking over all three of us to get his point across. What started as a 20-minute meeting ballooned into a 45-minute debacle which ultimately soured the rest of my weekend. Of course, instead of getting together and hashing things out, we waited to talk to each other until roughly a week before the proposal was due. In the meantime, I decided to take matters into my own hands by shooting off an email to the Data Viz professor which read: [Brian] mentioned to me that we're supposed to get our proposal plans finalized. Since I'd like to get moving on the project, I figured I'd share some potential research questions and hopefully get some feedback. The following list proposes three potential questions:~How can we use visualization to:- Increase student enjoyment when practicing an instrument (gamification)- Pinpoint musical errors during practice- Reduce time to mastering a piece of music~I imagine we could hit on one, some, or all three of these in the proposal, but I wasn't sure if these were appropriate questions for the course. Jeremy Grifski, February 18th, 2019 Thanks to my assertiveness, we were told to tackle musical errors. This eliminated a need for us to waste time getting together again, so I was pretty happy with myself. Proposal Meeting #2 Of course, finding a topic and writing a proposal are two very different things. As a result, Brian made me meet with him yet again. Like usual, he made me meet him late Friday after one of my classes. However, this time he forced me to meet him in the library, so I had to go a bit out of my way. Also like usual, he showed up late. This combination of factors led me to be a little irritated before the meeting even started. Eventually, he showed up, and we found a place to sit. Right away he began trying to download and install tools for building the proposal document. Apparently, he wanted us to collaboratively write the thing right then and there. Fortunately for me, he isn't very good at getting tools to work, so he gave up on that after awhile. At that point, he opened a Google Doc and started dumping bullet points into it. To me, I felt like that was a little weird considering we had a GitHub repo for the project already. Of course, I didn't want to stop him from actually getting work done, so I let him keep writing. After about 45 minutes, we had brainstormed enough content to go on our separate ways. At that point, I offered to write the proposal myself as long as he promised to complete the presentation. Luckily for me, he was all for it. Proposal Workflow As mentioned previously, Brian and I had agreed to split the work 50/50. He was responsible for the presentation, and I was responsible for the paper proposal. To be honest, I only chose that paper proposal because I didn't want to have to waste any time teaching Brian LateX, Git, or anything else to get the paper proposal done. The Sunday before everything was due, I decided to write up the proposal. When I was done, I made a pull request to our repository, so Brian could review it. Since I knew Brian wasn't going to be able to proofread the LaTeX, I provided him with a PDF for convenience. Unfortunately, he didn't know how to use the pull request review functionality on GitHub (nor did he really understand Markdown), so he ended up submitting a giant block of comments. While that was fine on its own, many of the comments were just nitpicks in my opinion. For example, he complained about the naming convention for a popular tool (i.e. Garage Band vs. GarageBand). Meanwhile, other comments demonstrated a lack of understanding. For example, he claimed that I used a number that seemed random when in reality it was well-defined (sort of like pi). Later, he made a comment about a copyright statement that I left in the paper. If he had read the template, he would have known that it explicitly states that we must keep that copyright statement even if it looks like gibberish. To make matters worse, not 24 hours after he had made those comments, he sent me a text that read: Hey, I left comments on the paper proposalBrian, February 26th, 2019 Immediately, I started having flashbacks to my corporate days. Does he think he's my manager? What about his presentation? I hadn't heard so much as a word about that. Proposal Presentation To no one's surprise, I hadn't heard about the presentation because he didn't even work on it. I found that out the hard way when I received a text the night before the presentation that read: Hey sorry for the radio silence... I think I might have mono and I don't know if I should be going to class tm but I can finish the presentation tonight for sureBrian, February 27th, 2019 At that moment, I just had to laugh. Then, I took a screenshot and sent it to my wife because I couldn't make this shit up. Despite his illness, Brian made sure I had a presentation to give the following morning. Fortunately, it went well. After all, I got us a 95 out of 100 including some great comments: + good presentation style (interaction with the audience)+ Good motivations and goals and good questions in the domain.+ good research questions (designing good non-intuitive vis algorithm/ method… )+ excellent that Steve is an expert who can evaluate the design too. Data Viz Professor, February 28th, 2019 However, they also had some odd feedback like: - it would be better to improve the key discussion on the vis mapping methods etc. / focus on the principles. (-5) - No need to present the stretch goal - just do not do it. Data Viz Professor, February 28th, 2019 Within hours of receiving our grade, I received a text from Brian which read: Hey great job on the presentation, wish I could've been thereBrian, February 28th, 2019 To which I said: Haha no sweat. Hope you start feeling better soon.Jeremy, February 28th, 2019 Unfortunately, I had fallen for the bait because he followed that up with: Also what did you present for the stretch goal?Brian, February 28th, 2019 Like, for real? He really used my compassion against me. Who does that? Also, why does it matter what I presented? Is he really going to complain about not getting a 100% when I also wrote the proposal? Unbelievable. Prototyping Following the presentation, we had about 3 weeks to come up with a prototype. During the first week, I decided to start putting together some GitHub issues to start tracking progress. Almost immediately, I received a barrage of nasty texts from my partner which read: Hey I'll be doing a lot of work over spring break!But too busy this week to do anythingCheck out my GitHub to see some midi examplesBrian. March 4th, 2019 All of these texts could have been responses on GitHub, but I'm sure Brian didn't want anyone to see his sad attempts to dodge work again. Unfortunately for him, I've been ranting about working with other people for awhile on this website, so he wasn't going to get away with it. Naturally, I never responded, but I did take a look at the repo he linked. It contained a ton of unorganized code that I didn't feel like sifting through. Instead, I started building up our prototype from scratch. With just three days left in spring break, I had built up about half of the expected prototype. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Brian didn't do a damn thing, and we were supposed to present in just four days. Since I wasn't really that worried about the presentation, I figured I'd wait until the last possible minute to remind Brian of the deadline. That way, he'd panic and scramble to put something together for the presentation again. If I'm going to have a bad partner, the least I can do is have some fun with them. Final Review Eventually, Brian started to help in a pretty big way. In fact, he managed to do a lot of the things I wasn't skilled in like styling, so my faith in teams was partially restored. Sure, he was a bit of a deadline hero, but he always made sure to get his work done. I guess jokes on me for thinking he had to fit some sort of mold. As it turns out, Brian was really passionate about our project, so he wanted to see things through. Fortunately for him, I was fairly passionate about the project, so things took a turn for the better. Sure there were bumps along the way, but I'd say my overall experience was positive. Of course, Brian's behavior as the semester went on didn't exactly discount the stress he caused me early in the semester. However, I'd say I was relatively pleased with him as a partner. I guess not all teams are bad, but it's very rare to find a group of people that I genuinely enjoy working with. The Takeaway What's a 4000-word rant without some sort of takeaway? As it turns out, I've taken some time to reflect on my experience with teams, so here are my thoughts: Hard Work Leads to Harder Work One of the things I've noticed when working in teams is how the hard workers tend to be punished for their hard work. This a near universal phenomenon that I've seen everywhere from the classroom to the industry. But, what exactly do I mean by punished? Well, think about every time you've worked really hard to accomplish something for a team. There are generally three problems that follow: Everyone is rewarded equally.Someone complains about your work.You end up being the only one to go back and patch up mistakes. This is a vicious cycle that ultimately ends in burnout. After all, you're the only one doing the work and taking the abuse if it isn't up to par. When you're successful, everyone celebrates as if they somehow had a hand in the results. It's hard, and it's often why I prefer to work alone. Communication Breeds Inefficiency When you're in a team, you have to communicate. Unfortunately, different people have different ideas of what communication means, and lot of people still think you need to have large group meetings to get work done. If the team decides to have a meeting, they have to get buy-in from everyone. Otherwise, they're stuck having several small meetings. If they have a large meeting, a lot of people are going to be there that may not need to be there which is a waste of time. Likewise, larger meetings tend to bring in more competing interests which further wastes time. To make matters worse, you end up wasting valuable time waiting for the meeting to occur. Most of the time these issues are a result of people taking themselves too seriously. When was the last time you had a meeting that needed to actually happen? Most of the time you can get away with sharing plans in an email, on GitHub, or in passing. Very rarely do you need to "touch base" before getting to work—especially in an academic setting. Projects literally have no impact on the lives of anyone. Some People Just Suck I can't think of a single time I've been on a team where someone didn't try to take advantage of my work ethic. Hell, this entire website exists because an old friend was taking advantage of me. In addition, I've dealt with teammates who: Quit/dropped outContacted me at all hours via personal devicesCriticized my effortsWasted my time with pointless meetingsDid not carry their weightCompleted assignments at the last possible minuteLied about their lives to get out of work And, I'm sure you've experienced worse. Some people just suck, and working in teams can bring out the worst in people. You're Not Alone While I was ranting away in this piece, I decided to search around to see if anyone else had struggled with this exact problem. Turns out, I'm not alone, and neither are you! The following list contains some of my favorite articles on working in groups: Group projects SUCK and here's whyWhy Teamwork Sucks (my personal favorite) Overall, I find working alone more pleasurable. I can tinker and make mistakes on my own schedule at my own pace without someone breathing down my neck or letting me down. That said, after all this ranting, I have to say that I don't actually hate working in teams. In a weird way, I even have some nostalgia for some of my old teams. Of course, that could be the nostalgia bias talking. Perhaps some day I'll find a group of individuals with a solid work ethic who inspire me to be my best self every day. For now, I'll stick to doing my own thing.