At my university marks and course content was divided up between exams and group projects. Individuals would optimize their own scores by focusing on exam tested content and hoping someone else in the group would carry them. People who wanted top marks always had to carry the entire group as the other members knew they could get away with not contributing and holding the grade hostage. It was a fucking nightmare, and if you complained then you were not a team player. Instead of dealing with a stressful discovery process where people promise to deliver work but fail to at the last minute I would just let the group know upfront that I’ll be carrying them. A lot of people graduated that probably shouldn’t have and I’ve been resentful of group work ever since. This was a top tier university so I’d hate to think that other universities are somehow even less rigerous.

Whenever I taught a course with group work, I would have the students give all the other students in the group a score each week. All the scores had to add up to 100. They had no problem giving any student not participating a zero. There was a formula we would run the scores through to give each student a final score that was a percentage of the total score for the project and their group participation scores. It worked quite well to give those who worked the hardest the most points and those who didn’t do any work zero points.

They tried that, it turned into this metagame with reprisals where others would work together and gang up on you so it would end up being many against one. Basically step one was to find the sucker, step two is make it stick. If you had a rep for good grades then you were de facto the sucker. You could tank the group and hope to fair better in a reshuffle but it was a lemon market and the replacements would be just as bad and now everyone knows you have given your previous team members poor scores. People quickly learned to never do that. So part of the optimization was to present lecturers with what they want to see with only minor deviations between individual rankings, effectively a voting ring. Presenting a false projection of reality in order to metagame politics was accidentally good training for real world work - but it really sucks having to do the work of 4 people.

I’m sure if the lecturers cared they could have managed it properly but they didn’t I don’t know of any who did.

I should point out that I only taught online course. The students lived all over the world and never met in person.

This whole discussion is about that you should expect and embrace this experience because while it’s possible to not end up in an organization like that, it… doesn’t happen often. This is the rare case where uni grading and real life are actually in sync.

There's several types of "carrying".

You have the type where one person is the visionary, is capable, but doesn't have the patience to do the grunt work and only wants to do the most prestigous or "important" shit. They do it well, but expect the rest of the team to do the thankless stuff.

This is the type i hate, and i rather not have them.

The other type is someone who is self-less, and just does the work regardless of self-interest or agenda. They will do both prestigious work, and will also do thankless work, as long as it contributes to the success of the project. They will stay late, fix up other's mistakes, etc, without complaints or expectation that others do the same.

This is the type i admire and want to work with.

Ye. "Super stars" are often just people that stampede the other devs. Like, working together is so inefficient in bigger teams that someone let loose will appear very productive, but he is slowing down everyone else.

I know several who are in the second category. The problem with constantly fixing other's mistakes is the other people never learn to take responsibility. They know the people carrying the project are not going to let it fail. No matter what, whatever they did is going to get fixed.

> The other type is someone who is self-less, and just does the work regardless of self-interest or agenda. They will do both prestigious work, and will also do thankless work, as long as it contributes to the success of the project. They will stay late, fix up other's mistakes, etc, without complaints or expectation that others do the same.

Been there, done that, it's a career dead-end.

I used to be that person, but the problem is that you’re creating an incentive structure that doesn’t enable the management chain to identify and correct problems. A company should not be standing on the shoulders of a single engineer doing thankless work to prevent catastrophe.

That's a very succint description of the arrogant person and the one whom everyone mislabels as arrogant.