> In school everyone always complains about group work sucking
I supervised software engineering projects at university. It works well when students in a group have similar motivation and abilities. This is the case when they are free to choose who they collaborate with. Otherwise, students are usually frustrated.
In a company, teams can be much more heterogeneous (cultural background, skills, age, social status, experience...), and the pressure is higher: goals can be loosely defined, evaluation is less fair, stakes are higher for everyone, managers can be less benevolent than teachers...
> But too often, people that prefer teamwork, really just want to be heard and receive credit for work done, together. But they're generally not very productive and their opinions not that valuable.
Not every team I've been on is like this, but this resonates. Some teams are the equivalent of group projects in school and I think most of us unfortunate enough to have endured those would agree.
For me, the best team is a group of like-minded and like-disciplined individuals that align well and otherwise operate separately.
> lean heavily toward group collaboration as a sort of security blanket
This happens and fosters groupthink and prevents critical thinking and creativity.
When a whole team (or company) comes up with a poorly designed product this is often the reason.
You can fight this by talking about the problem, encouraging constructive criticism, engaging with communities and other social groups, gathering anonymous feedback from other teams.
> My experience with teams where people are divided by topics for a long time is that unpleasant work that does not fit into a single topic well gets neglected.
I doubt it isn't the case either way. If you neglect understanding and development of expertise, you will still end up with some people having more expertise than others, and possible blind spots. Except now you have no idea what those blind spots are. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10970937)
> In our case, making two teams work independently on the same problem just created a situation where each team had half as many resources.
You got it. Not to mention that you're incentivizing them to hoard work/attention/resources from one another, or engage in other organizational anti-patterns that would obviously be/become problems to solve if you didn't put the artificial "constraint" of internal competition in the way.
> Finally, most important projects were done in groups of 2 to 5-6
Much less reason to cheat in group work too. It's much easier to just put in minimal effort and let someone else in the group do the work. That's just another form of cheating.
In Germany we say "Team" in teamwork is an acronym for "Toll Ein Anderer Machts" (great someone else does the work) and especially in university there is a lot of truth to it. Especially so when there is a big difference in motivation in regards to the final grade.
Not to say there aren't a lot of upsides to group work. But stopping people that don't wanna engage with the subject isn't one of them.
> I don't know why people waste their time using teams
Because its use is mandated by workplaces, schools, and lots of other entities & communities. I rather hate Teams, but suddenly I’m finding myself spending half my days with it.
> We can’t be successful together if we’re aiming for different outcomes. If one of us feels our goals or motives aren’t aligned, we need to talk.
That is actually not true. When building a team it is important to learn what each individual seeks out of the "project". For example your goal might be to use the project as a way to get promoted. I might not care at all about getting promoted and instead my goal is to learn new stuff. Our colleague might be using the project as a way to push some new technology into broader acceptance in the company. Our other colleagues goal might be to bail half way through because they never wanted to be on the project in the first place. All four of us have different motivations and personal goals for this project--and that is totally okay!
It isn't a good idea to assume everybody has the same goal. It is a good idea to at least address this in the beginnings of team building. Knowing that you are trying to get a promo out of this would help me help you get that promo.
> Coordinating with other teams would slow you down, so it was basically forbidden.
Are you sure team size was actually a factor? I've seen rules/cultures like these before and they always end in disaster, regardless of team size.
Small teams that actually coordinate, on the other hand, seem to do just fine in my experience. In fact, one of the biggest problems with oversized teams is the combinatorial explosion of communication channels https://project-management.info/number-of-communication-chan...
> But that does mean that those people are actually needed in any way.
True, the presence of people who spend time coordinating is not sufficient for success, nor is their presence in any way evidence of success.
But the absence of people who devote time to coordination has definitely sunk projects I've been on, including ones stacked with brilliant rockstars. It may simply be correlation, but I have never worked on a large, successful project that lacked people who were willing to invest significant effort in coordination.
> Being aligned with teammates on what you're building is more important than building the right thing.
I don't buy this. I'm not sure these two things should be placed in opposition (or at least tension) in this way. It makes for a nice soundbite but I don't think it withstands scrutiny.
I've seen and worked in teams where alignment was great and we all worked really well together but, at the end of it all, nobody bought the damn product. I.e., we didn't build the right thing. Let's not kid ourselves: aligning and working well together to build the wrong thing is somewhat pointless (granted, you might learn some useful lessons along the way). Now, if you take that team and then assign them to build the right thing you have something really powerful.
> At worst, the former is a neutral in his overall contributions
No, with an extra teammate the expectations on your team increases, so you have to work hard enough to pay for that guys salary as well.
Lets extend this a bit, would you prefer to work in a team with 5 incompetent but nice persons who don't contribute anything, so your work has to be enough to pay all their salaries, or would you want to work with 5 assholes who work hard enough that you can slack all day because they pick it up? I'm sure a majority would prefer the second scenario, the first scenario would lead to burnout really quickly and soon they will call you the toxic asshole genius.
At least in my school the end goal was never collaboration but getting a good grade. Thus individuals who cared did most if not all work.
Those group projects had sense only if you were paired with equally skilled and motivated ppl.
And ofcourse you had to LIKE them. Its exteremely hard to be cooperative with ppl you consider as assholes.
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