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Client this morning told me that a few days ago one of her neighbours found an unexploded bomb in their garden. Army dudes came out and took it into the field behind the houses and blew it up. And I'll be honest, mystery ordnance was a hazard I didn't think to consider when I decided to become a gardener.
Great way to get a start on a water feature.
Does the UK keep track of unexploded stuff in the ground? Netherlands has a bunch of open data on that and some 3rd party has a fun website https://www.explosievenopsporing.nl/veo-bommenkaart/ Essentially: if an area was useful in 1940, 1944 or 1945 there's probably bombs in the ground.
<*Looks up area where grandparents lived in WWII*>
Oh, this gives me an idea of how to finally monetize Gen Xers! I will create a service of middle-aged skateboarders who will, upon hire, do an ollie off of your bosses desk while performing the action or words of your choice.
Options for your middle aged Gen Xer:
- giving the bird with both hands.
- throwing up the horns
- laughing
- Saying "later, losers"
- Saying, "Ok, Boomer"
- Saying any phrase of your choosing, limited by length
In an office setting, Gen Xer can perform:
- Ollie Airwalk
- Dolphin flip
- Nollie hard flip
- Nollie tail side
- Willy Grind
- Other 90s tricks no one does anymore!
Will they provide their own Goldfinger CD, or should I bring one for them?
I am reminded of the dentist that called my software team, after giving birth, while still at the hospital, to yell at me that our software wasn’t meeting expectations.
America is an insane place.
Yeah.
À propos, how good are White Americans (compared to other cultures) at working as a team without a boss manager assigning tasks? Like, non-hierarchical teamwork? Were you ever formally/institutionally taught how to work with fellow workers of equal authority but different expertise? How about dispute resolution? Workplace or otherwise? Did your schools expect you to learn these skills on your own? And did you?
I think a group of workers having difficulty organizing their work among themselves is extremely profitable for people who sell their work-organizing skills. And, being as their jobs depend on workers not being to work out their own problems by themselves, there's an incentive for managers to sabotage their employees' ability to self-manage. I'm not saying that managers do that as a rule, but I am saying there's an incentive.
Because I'm gathering the sneaking suspicion that the American (and perhaps Canadian, British and other European) education system(s) and mass media was manipulated into making just-competent-enough workers that wouldn't be able to collaborate and coordinate between themselves effectively enough to make the ruling class obsolete for getting vital work done (like food production & other food-related activities, shelter-building, transport building and management, health care, etc.).
I mean, are kids formally taught and given time and experienced help to practice people skills throughout K-12 education? (In the West Island of Montreal, Quebec, in my elementary and high school, there was some, but it was not officially part of the curriculum. Literally the only formal interpersonal education I got was as part of "how to be a good Christian Catholic" classes.) Or are they left to fend for themselves and learn as they go? Has that changed since I graduated high school in 2006?
I'm not saying there's some vast planned conspiracy either. It's more like class solidarity among the powerful, I guess. I mean, they don't have to spend any amount of hours getting work done for other people, they have time to independently think up shit like this.
tl;dr: It's good praxis to learn how to work as a team without a boss, which is why they don't really teach you how to do that in school.
re the first: in practice, one or two people usually get stuck with it because the rest of the team is lazy and/or useless.
so, excellent preparation for working life!
Yes, but are you taught how to work as a group? By a teacher? Like, do they explain what respect actually means in practice? How to argue in a mutually beneficial way? Are there examples given of good and bad team dynamics? And so on. If teamwork education is done properly now, great! It wasn't done so in the 90s, when I was in primary school.
Also, giving group work without also giving teamwork education has a high risk of discouraging inadequate team performers from forming teams without being forced to. It is likely that, after enough bad experiences, they'll just assume that they work better alone (this is what I believed for a long time) and their bad teamwork "can't be helped" and give up on developing good teamworking skills on their own initiative.
As for sports, same problem as the previous paragraph, except for those extracurricular team sport activities with a coach, because that just reinforces the notion that "the best way for us all to work together is by common obedience to an authority figure", which is exactly the problem I was decrying.
Yes, but are you taught how to work as a group? By a teacher? Like, do they explain what respect actually means in practice? How to argue in a mutually beneficial way? Are there examples given of good and bad team dynamics? And so on. If teamwork education is done properly now, great! It wasn't done so in the 90s, when I was in primary school.
Also, giving group work without also giving teamwork education has a high risk of discouraging inadequate team performers from forming teams without being forced to. It is likely that, after enough bad experiences, they'll just assume that they work better alone (this is what I believed for a long time) and their bad teamwork "can't be helped" and give up on developing good teamworking skills on their own initiative.
As for sports, same problem as the previous paragraph, except for those extracurricular team sport activities with a coach, because that just reinforces the notion that "the best way for us all to work together is by common obedience to an authority figure", which is exactly the problem I was decrying.
Ugh, yes. Group work in school was always a problem of feeling like I had to pick up everyone else's slack half the time (especially for long projects, and whether it was true or not).
The people running our capitalist hellscape don't have the forward planning skills to morph education into that kind of 1984esque population control.
When they do it at all it's either a short term ploy to get free training for their labor force "MORE STEM LESS LIBERAL ARTS!!" or they're more concerned with keeping their white christian cultural hegemony on top.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Yes, but are you taught how to work as a group? By a teacher? Like, do they explain what respect actually means in practice? How to argue in a mutually beneficial way? Are there examples given of good and bad team dynamics? And so on. If teamwork education is done properly now, great! It wasn't done so in the 90s, when I was in primary school.
Also, giving group work without also giving teamwork education has a high risk of discouraging inadequate team performers from forming teams without being forced to. It is likely that, after enough bad experiences, they'll just assume that they work better alone (this is what I believed for a long time) and their bad teamwork "can't be helped" and give up on developing good teamworking skills on their own initiative.
As for sports, same problem as the previous paragraph, except for those extracurricular team sport activities with a coach, because that just reinforces the notion that "the best way for us all to work together is by common obedience to an authority figure", which is exactly the problem I was decrying.
No to everything. Group work is directly stated to be you either succeed or fail as a group and oftentimes the rules will include that caveat that even if one person is slacking and not doing anything then you have to make it up or you'll fail. Add in the cliques if groups are allowed to be self-forming and you have the neurodivergent people either left to form a "leftovers" group or taken advantage of by one of the popular cliques as they dump all the work on them then take credit. Which is allowed because "that's how the work force in reality is" since children must be molded into a cog of the machine early.
It's not just limited to children either. In university I often had to make up the work of at least one other person on a team every class report, otherwise it'd be my grades that suffered. It is the only time in my life I have turned to drinking alcohol because of sheer stress. Though when I say "alcohol" I mean like an inch of midori in a giant cup and the rest is 7-Up or Sprite. Placebo effect. Raiding teams in high-level content fall into this too. Got some slackers in the group? Whole group wipes, no one gets anything. If slackers are popular clique good luck getting rid of them and when loot does eventually drop it's probably going to them.
To this day I despise working in a group because I have never had a group worth a shit where everyone puts in the effort. So yeah, I'd honestly rather be given the group project to do by myself with extended timeframe. At least then I can have assurance that if anything goes wrong it was wholly because of me and not extraneous human error.
Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered User, Transition Teamregular
edited April 2022
The way I approach group projects is its always optional.
A student is allowed to partner up with one to two classmates, or work solo on the project/activity. If a member of a group is largely absent or not-supportive towards their project (via private surveys with their teammates), they get a lower grade.
I have received overwhelming evidence back that students prefer this model.
But that said, for in-class activities that are to be completed in 40+ minutes? I'll utilize groups via jigsaw methods. Those activities are largely discourse-heavy, with almost no outside of class-time attached.
On the previous page where you talk about the tiktok series of millennial workers vs boomer bosses
It's the opposite way for me as most of the workers are millennials but nearly all but 2 of the managers are millennials so it is annoying they lack the skills to do what needs to be done {communication skills and teaching skills}
As they have poorly explained the new backstock plan as I have spent time every day doing that for them but I really need to stop doing the manager's job for them
They constantly whine how since the new programs they are there to 11 to 1pm doing things because of their failures to teach the program or generally explain da plan for the day
As when they start the shift they lack the confidence as you can hear it in their voice to their body language
0
MrMonroepassed outon the floor nowRegistered Userregular
I never understood why they did the "succeed/fail as a group" thing. That's... not how it works in real life. If Jeff in Accounting doesn't do the accounting stuff they don't fuck with Jessica from Sales' variable comp. Seems like a reasonable alternative would be you have to create a project plan as a group that clearly identifies who is responsible/accountable for what, and then everyone gets graded individually on their performance against the project plan.
The fail as a group approach seems like all it teaches you about is the Prisoner's Dilemma.
The people running our capitalist hellscape don't have the forward planning skills to morph education into that kind of 1984esque population control.
When they do it at all it's either a short term ploy to get free training for their labor force "MORE STEM LESS LIBERAL ARTS!!" or they're more concerned with keeping their white christian cultural hegemony on top.
This? This right here? The systemic neglect of teamwork education is paying off beautifully for the very people whose intellect you are dismissing, because I'm not sure how to address your critique in a mutually productive manner. I mean, you have a point, but you also don't?
The way I approach group projects is its always optional.
A student is allowed to partner up with one to two classmates, or work solo on the project/activity. If a member of a group is largely absent or not-supportive towards their project (via private surveys with their teammates), they get a lower grade.
I have received overwhelming evidence back that students prefer this model.
But that said, for in-class activities that are to be completed in 40+ minutes? I'll utilize groups via jigsaw methods. Those activities are largely discourse-heavy, with almost no outside of class-time attached.
This is generally what I do. It's funny to see the different dynamics of each class and whether they'll pair up or not. Another method that gets used (but not enough) is to assign specific group roles to the students with guidelines for the responsibilities of the role (and rotate the roles each time) so they can learn to split up and complete assignments effectively rather than just "Hey y'all 5 kids get this done however!" I think that's a decently newish method of working with students around here, though.
I loved group work in school. I did all the work so I knew we would get an A, and I put a bunch of chumps in my debt so they owed me favors going forward.
I went back to university after dropping mid-engineering, getting into IT for several years, and then going for a comp sci degree. (Originally planned bioinformatics masters.)
Having workplace experience and maturity, the group projects were comical and stress-free for me. Everyone else was more than happy to work on code or slides, so long as I did the talking at presentation time. Fucking deal!
One project was basically just: talk design, mentor/rubber-duck, write in a joke for the professor ("trust me, no one may get it but they will"), speak confidently and wing a presentation and have only the prof laugh.
Well today was my last day at the University. Will technically Friday is, but my boss is busy so he wants me to drop my stuff off at 11 so I have to leave at like 9:30, do not really doing any work.
Based on the conversation in the last thread, I didn't see anyone post that they have a job in finance in some capacity. I would be curious of people's perspectives (feel free to DM if you don't want to publicly post about it) if anyone else here has a similar finance/analyst role (I'm seeing more "financial operations" roles when I look around).
I run finance for a well capitalized startup. Have been a financial analyst (like an IB type work), have been an finance analyst in a more operational role, I have trained financial analysts, and have a couple working for me now. Happy to answer any questions you might have. We could also do a Zoom call or something if you like.
So I was scheduled the day off but I was texted to come into a poorly run shit show again. I already have 5+hour of OT and I feel I will get at least 2 more today sigh
0
FishmanPut your goddamned hand in the goddamned Box of Pain.Registered Userregular
edited April 2022
Here is my strongest memory of group work at school:
It was science fair season, and myself and a friend went in on putting a thing together. He was a chaotic whirlwind that liked to tinker with stuff that didn't always work, but definitely gave off proto-maker engineer vibes. He could be unfocussed, but he had previously built mad scientist kid stuff like his own slotcar set, a windlass crossbow, and we once cannibalised an entire school cupboards worth of ballpoint pens and turned them into tiny spring-powered single shot shooters and had a classroom war.
I thought I could temper his energy by bringing my own focus, research, and discipline.
So we chose a bullshit topic like "energy". I wrote, printed, painted, and assembled the entire diorama with tons of details about various current and potential future energy sources.
His job was to acquire some mini-solar panels, build a little circuit, light up some lights or something.
I put a bunch of hours of prep into my side, and then a couple days out I ask him how his stuff is going.
"Oh", he says, "the store didn't have the solar panels".
So he'd done nothing. And had no solution.
So the night before it was due, I stayed up building a tin can steam generator, doing the physical part of the presentation too.
On presentation day, I set the whole thing up, and then people were let through in groups. His group was ahead of mine.
Before I get in, the fire alarm is tripped and we all spill outside, and my partner returns to me, roaring with laughter.
"Hey", I say, "do you know what happened?"
"Yeah", he replies, still laughing, "our project caught fire".
"...what?"
Turns out, when he got to our presentation, he though the fire under the steam engine was a little low. So he reached behind the project and grabbed the meths spirits fuel we were using, and added some himself directly to the literal open flame. Starting a Meths fire.
It wasn't a total loss - somehow we advanced to the second round of judging (I guess we got points for mad science?).
In our whole presentation, though, there was only one hand-written page on the project display. Just one that took an hour or more of effort to diagram and draw by hand. All the others were printed, and saved.
No prizes for guessing which was the only bit of paper that was totally unrecoverable from the project.
So that day, after nearly burning down the entire building, I had to go back and repair what I could of the presentation, remove the burnt page, re-do all that hand-written work again and return to school again the next day for final judging.
I decided against setting up the actual open flame steam engine. We didn't advance.
So to recap, my partner:
Contributed no research or presentation work.
Failed to build their practical demonstration part of the project.
Literally set fire to the project and evacuated the building.
And then still made me do all the work of doing it all over again for the next day.
Still, I guess he got his name on the contributing presenter list, so good work that guy, I guess. He's lucky I liked coming over and playing with his slotcar set.
I have two favorite group work memories from college:
1. Had the typical "one guy that doesn't show up" and he tried to stand with us for the final class presentation. We had pre-agreed that we would not let him do that (normally, societal awkwardness means they get to), so stands up - we all stare lasers into him and shake our heads and he slowly sits back down as the reality of "I'm getting a 0 on this" sets in. It was business school, so plenty of people skated by on shit like this.
2. Fully random group where only two of the five knew each other (football player and a cheerleader). I was tired of leading groups, so just moved to support mode on the group, cheerleader took point on it despite not feeling super confident. She absolutely killed it in terms of organization and coordination, ensuring everyone did their work and we had a phenomenal group presentation with all five contributing meaningful content. It was awesome to see someone grow so much confidence in their ability in such a short time.
+11
Blake TDo you have enemies then?Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.Registered Userregular
Here’s the thing about group work at school,
As some of you have noticed, saying “everyone do group work” doesn’t work. Kids, by themselves don’t do group work. Group work is giving people specific roles which are tightly defined and get them to do them.
Like for an experiment there is usually four roles, epuipment manager (gets to measure and get equipment) project management who oversees the method, data collection who measures stuff, and safety officer who is my snitch. All are clear tasks, allow everyone something to do and everyone can participate.
The only time I ever sandbagged in a group project I also managed to sweet talk the instructor into giving us all As anyway so technically I did contribute.
The only thing that could have made that science fair experience a better prep for working in the actual sciences would have been if 5 other people you'd never met also had their names on the project ahead of you.
Also honestly the major thing that keeps most of my workplaces from self-organizing workflows is that the work is not necessary and everyone kinda knows it, so left to our own devices we'd simply not.
Though actually even at those places, it's way easier to just have a team that just tosses feature requests at you. Like I went from essentially non-managed at a prior job to having a direct report and the major difference was that I had to come up with bullshit to say in a weekly meeting and our projects became more ambitious and less capable of actually succeeding.
My team is essentially self managed 90% of the time i guess, but that's pretty normal for research groups so i never thought about it too much. Our manager works remotely, we catch up over zoom every now and then. Which is bouncing off durandels point - we're motivated to self organize because the job we do feels concrete and has a point, and since everyone is a grown-up and knows other people are relying on them (and/or its a project we personally are interested in seeing completed), things get done.
minor incidentyou can't swim whenyou've been dead a hundred yearsRegistered User, Transition Teamregular
My team at work technically has an "IT Manager", but honestly he doesn't do shit. Or at least, not in an "IT Manager" role. He's more of a personal assistant to the CTO and we'll typically go days without anyone on my team even hearing a word from him. Beyond that, our team is a flat structure and pretty much entirely self-managed, from job duties to scheduling. It's not a bad setup.
Ah, it stinks, it sucks, it's anthropologically unjust
0
CornerEagleA fashion yes-man is no good to me.Copenhagen, DenmarkRegistered Userregular
Today should have been a Friday-ass Friday and instead it wasn't and I'm very tired now.
Literally getting called from emergency meeting to emergency meeting.
0
Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
Here is my bad group work story.
Intro to comparative religion in college. Professor was a huge fan of Survivor. You form groups at the start of the semester and pick a religion that you will present on at the end of the semester, giving your group the whole time to research and prepare.
Every week (?) the group HAS to kick someone out. That kicked out person has to create a new group with the other kicked out people, pick a new religion to present on. This had the effect of no group wanting to kick anyone out because it fucking sucked for those people who now had less time to research and had to start over from scratch so all the groups just drew straws or something.
I got kicked out a week before presentations just due to bad luck and had a very short period of time to prepare.
My group made our anger very obvious in our presentation and the entire class gave that professor incredibly bad reviews.
I told an advisor about this a year or two latter in passing and they were shocked and checked and told me the professor was not working there anymore.
Posts
<*Looks up area where grandparents lived in WWII*>
Yeah, that's a decent amount of blue, I guess.
Will they provide their own Goldfinger CD, or should I bring one for them?
Yeah.
À propos, how good are White Americans (compared to other cultures) at working as a team without a boss manager assigning tasks? Like, non-hierarchical teamwork? Were you ever formally/institutionally taught how to work with fellow workers of equal authority but different expertise? How about dispute resolution? Workplace or otherwise? Did your schools expect you to learn these skills on your own? And did you?
I think a group of workers having difficulty organizing their work among themselves is extremely profitable for people who sell their work-organizing skills. And, being as their jobs depend on workers not being to work out their own problems by themselves, there's an incentive for managers to sabotage their employees' ability to self-manage. I'm not saying that managers do that as a rule, but I am saying there's an incentive.
Because I'm gathering the sneaking suspicion that the American (and perhaps Canadian, British and other European) education system(s) and mass media was manipulated into making just-competent-enough workers that wouldn't be able to collaborate and coordinate between themselves effectively enough to make the ruling class obsolete for getting vital work done (like food production & other food-related activities, shelter-building, transport building and management, health care, etc.).
I mean, are kids formally taught and given time and experienced help to practice people skills throughout K-12 education? (In the West Island of Montreal, Quebec, in my elementary and high school, there was some, but it was not officially part of the curriculum. Literally the only formal interpersonal education I got was as part of "how to be a good Christian Catholic" classes.) Or are they left to fend for themselves and learn as they go? Has that changed since I graduated high school in 2006?
I'm not saying there's some vast planned conspiracy either. It's more like class solidarity among the powerful, I guess. I mean, they don't have to spend any amount of hours getting work done for other people, they have time to independently think up shit like this.
tl;dr: It's good praxis to learn how to work as a team without a boss, which is why they don't really teach you how to do that in school.
Not to mention you know, sports
re the first: in practice, one or two people usually get stuck with it because the rest of the team is lazy and/or useless.
so, excellent preparation for working life!
Yes, but are you taught how to work as a group? By a teacher? Like, do they explain what respect actually means in practice? How to argue in a mutually beneficial way? Are there examples given of good and bad team dynamics? And so on. If teamwork education is done properly now, great! It wasn't done so in the 90s, when I was in primary school.
Also, giving group work without also giving teamwork education has a high risk of discouraging inadequate team performers from forming teams without being forced to. It is likely that, after enough bad experiences, they'll just assume that they work better alone (this is what I believed for a long time) and their bad teamwork "can't be helped" and give up on developing good teamworking skills on their own initiative.
As for sports, same problem as the previous paragraph, except for those extracurricular team sport activities with a coach, because that just reinforces the notion that "the best way for us all to work together is by common obedience to an authority figure", which is exactly the problem I was decrying.
Ugh, yes. Group work in school was always a problem of feeling like I had to pick up everyone else's slack half the time (especially for long projects, and whether it was true or not).
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
When they do it at all it's either a short term ploy to get free training for their labor force "MORE STEM LESS LIBERAL ARTS!!" or they're more concerned with keeping their white christian cultural hegemony on top.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
No to everything. Group work is directly stated to be you either succeed or fail as a group and oftentimes the rules will include that caveat that even if one person is slacking and not doing anything then you have to make it up or you'll fail. Add in the cliques if groups are allowed to be self-forming and you have the neurodivergent people either left to form a "leftovers" group or taken advantage of by one of the popular cliques as they dump all the work on them then take credit. Which is allowed because "that's how the work force in reality is" since children must be molded into a cog of the machine early.
It's not just limited to children either. In university I often had to make up the work of at least one other person on a team every class report, otherwise it'd be my grades that suffered. It is the only time in my life I have turned to drinking alcohol because of sheer stress. Though when I say "alcohol" I mean like an inch of midori in a giant cup and the rest is 7-Up or Sprite. Placebo effect. Raiding teams in high-level content fall into this too. Got some slackers in the group? Whole group wipes, no one gets anything. If slackers are popular clique good luck getting rid of them and when loot does eventually drop it's probably going to them.
To this day I despise working in a group because I have never had a group worth a shit where everyone puts in the effort. So yeah, I'd honestly rather be given the group project to do by myself with extended timeframe. At least then I can have assurance that if anything goes wrong it was wholly because of me and not extraneous human error.
Gone are the days of receiving 100 emails a day.
Here in the future, you receive 100 emails and 500 teams chat messages a day.
The really impressive thing is that the project was 6 months ahead of schedule.
First response from my boss: "did you contact clients?"
Motherfucker I'm calling out, not working!
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
A student is allowed to partner up with one to two classmates, or work solo on the project/activity. If a member of a group is largely absent or not-supportive towards their project (via private surveys with their teammates), they get a lower grade.
I have received overwhelming evidence back that students prefer this model.
But that said, for in-class activities that are to be completed in 40+ minutes? I'll utilize groups via jigsaw methods. Those activities are largely discourse-heavy, with almost no outside of class-time attached.
It's the opposite way for me as most of the workers are millennials but nearly all but 2 of the managers are millennials so it is annoying they lack the skills to do what needs to be done {communication skills and teaching skills}
As they have poorly explained the new backstock plan as I have spent time every day doing that for them but I really need to stop doing the manager's job for them
They constantly whine how since the new programs they are there to 11 to 1pm doing things because of their failures to teach the program or generally explain da plan for the day
As when they start the shift they lack the confidence as you can hear it in their voice to their body language
The fail as a group approach seems like all it teaches you about is the Prisoner's Dilemma.
This? This right here? The systemic neglect of teamwork education is paying off beautifully for the very people whose intellect you are dismissing, because I'm not sure how to address your critique in a mutually productive manner. I mean, you have a point, but you also don't?
Eh, it's late, I'm going to bed.
This is generally what I do. It's funny to see the different dynamics of each class and whether they'll pair up or not. Another method that gets used (but not enough) is to assign specific group roles to the students with guidelines for the responsibilities of the role (and rotate the roles each time) so they can learn to split up and complete assignments effectively rather than just "Hey y'all 5 kids get this done however!" I think that's a decently newish method of working with students around here, though.
wish list
Steam wishlist
Etsy wishlist
Win fucking win babyyyyyy
On account of not having friends in a class!
And the teachers didn't seem to notice.
But luckily they also didn't notice that I'd just copy the experiment results from the smart kid group.
Having workplace experience and maturity, the group projects were comical and stress-free for me. Everyone else was more than happy to work on code or slides, so long as I did the talking at presentation time. Fucking deal!
One project was basically just: talk design, mentor/rubber-duck, write in a joke for the professor ("trust me, no one may get it but they will"), speak confidently and wing a presentation and have only the prof laugh.
Easy A+.
Napkin math brought it to roughly 1.75 cents per vehicle
I spent the rest of the shift being angry.
If my group had to talk for 15 minutes and we ran out of steam 5 minutes in? Oh, I'll yammer on for ten more minutes.
I'll make a meal out of an appetizer with the magic of a desperate man.
I run finance for a well capitalized startup. Have been a financial analyst (like an IB type work), have been an finance analyst in a more operational role, I have trained financial analysts, and have a couple working for me now. Happy to answer any questions you might have. We could also do a Zoom call or something if you like.
It was science fair season, and myself and a friend went in on putting a thing together. He was a chaotic whirlwind that liked to tinker with stuff that didn't always work, but definitely gave off proto-maker engineer vibes. He could be unfocussed, but he had previously built mad scientist kid stuff like his own slotcar set, a windlass crossbow, and we once cannibalised an entire school cupboards worth of ballpoint pens and turned them into tiny spring-powered single shot shooters and had a classroom war.
I thought I could temper his energy by bringing my own focus, research, and discipline.
So we chose a bullshit topic like "energy". I wrote, printed, painted, and assembled the entire diorama with tons of details about various current and potential future energy sources.
His job was to acquire some mini-solar panels, build a little circuit, light up some lights or something.
I put a bunch of hours of prep into my side, and then a couple days out I ask him how his stuff is going.
"Oh", he says, "the store didn't have the solar panels".
So he'd done nothing. And had no solution.
So the night before it was due, I stayed up building a tin can steam generator, doing the physical part of the presentation too.
On presentation day, I set the whole thing up, and then people were let through in groups. His group was ahead of mine.
Before I get in, the fire alarm is tripped and we all spill outside, and my partner returns to me, roaring with laughter.
"Hey", I say, "do you know what happened?"
"Yeah", he replies, still laughing, "our project caught fire".
"...what?"
Turns out, when he got to our presentation, he though the fire under the steam engine was a little low. So he reached behind the project and grabbed the meths spirits fuel we were using, and added some himself directly to the literal open flame. Starting a Meths fire.
It wasn't a total loss - somehow we advanced to the second round of judging (I guess we got points for mad science?).
In our whole presentation, though, there was only one hand-written page on the project display. Just one that took an hour or more of effort to diagram and draw by hand. All the others were printed, and saved.
No prizes for guessing which was the only bit of paper that was totally unrecoverable from the project.
So that day, after nearly burning down the entire building, I had to go back and repair what I could of the presentation, remove the burnt page, re-do all that hand-written work again and return to school again the next day for final judging.
I decided against setting up the actual open flame steam engine. We didn't advance.
So to recap, my partner:
Contributed no research or presentation work.
Failed to build their practical demonstration part of the project.
Literally set fire to the project and evacuated the building.
And then still made me do all the work of doing it all over again for the next day.
Still, I guess he got his name on the contributing presenter list, so good work that guy, I guess. He's lucky I liked coming over and playing with his slotcar set.
1. Had the typical "one guy that doesn't show up" and he tried to stand with us for the final class presentation. We had pre-agreed that we would not let him do that (normally, societal awkwardness means they get to), so stands up - we all stare lasers into him and shake our heads and he slowly sits back down as the reality of "I'm getting a 0 on this" sets in. It was business school, so plenty of people skated by on shit like this.
2. Fully random group where only two of the five knew each other (football player and a cheerleader). I was tired of leading groups, so just moved to support mode on the group, cheerleader took point on it despite not feeling super confident. She absolutely killed it in terms of organization and coordination, ensuring everyone did their work and we had a phenomenal group presentation with all five contributing meaningful content. It was awesome to see someone grow so much confidence in their ability in such a short time.
As some of you have noticed, saying “everyone do group work” doesn’t work. Kids, by themselves don’t do group work. Group work is giving people specific roles which are tightly defined and get them to do them.
Like for an experiment there is usually four roles, epuipment manager (gets to measure and get equipment) project management who oversees the method, data collection who measures stuff, and safety officer who is my snitch. All are clear tasks, allow everyone something to do and everyone can participate.
Satans..... hints.....
Yep, I got strep. One guess whether he's going to want me to call my clients for tomorrow or not
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
Also honestly the major thing that keeps most of my workplaces from self-organizing workflows is that the work is not necessary and everyone kinda knows it, so left to our own devices we'd simply not.
Though actually even at those places, it's way easier to just have a team that just tosses feature requests at you. Like I went from essentially non-managed at a prior job to having a direct report and the major difference was that I had to come up with bullshit to say in a weekly meeting and our projects became more ambitious and less capable of actually succeeding.
Literally getting called from emergency meeting to emergency meeting.
Intro to comparative religion in college. Professor was a huge fan of Survivor. You form groups at the start of the semester and pick a religion that you will present on at the end of the semester, giving your group the whole time to research and prepare.
Every week (?) the group HAS to kick someone out. That kicked out person has to create a new group with the other kicked out people, pick a new religion to present on. This had the effect of no group wanting to kick anyone out because it fucking sucked for those people who now had less time to research and had to start over from scratch so all the groups just drew straws or something.
I got kicked out a week before presentations just due to bad luck and had a very short period of time to prepare.
My group made our anger very obvious in our presentation and the entire class gave that professor incredibly bad reviews.
I told an advisor about this a year or two latter in passing and they were shocked and checked and told me the professor was not working there anymore.