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Hangout for experimental confirmation and demonstration of software, computing, and networking. The exercises don't always work out. The professor is a bumbler and the laboratory assistant is a skanky dufus.
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2006-02-19Performing in Teams: Where's the Praxis?FREAKONOMICS BLOG » A Creative NASCAR Incentive. Stephen J. Dubner’s observations about NASCAR teams has me wonder about how software-development groups excel as teams. In particular, can high-performance teams function with group rather than individual incentive/compensation? In the case of the Hendrick Motorsports team bonus for making the Chase for the Nextel Cup, Dubner speculates
{tags: Freakonomics Roland Fryer teamwork software engineering praxis group incentives orcmid} My speculation is that there really must be identification with the group and ownership of the group result for teamwork to happen, whatever explanation the performers offer for the extra effort. I have seen software “teams” respond with individual cynicism and a fantastic array of undermining passive-aggressive behaviors. Having practiced most of those in my career I can provide an account of what happens in terms of what I would be doing in those circumstances. Whatever’s happening, it isn’t pretty and its always “their” fault. This didn’t come home to me until 2003 when I was in an M.Sc in IT software engineering course where we were called upon to form and work as teams. This led me to understand that, even in a course where process and teamwork is the point, cowboy behavior tends to be dominant. The pattern seems to be justified by the view that everyone else is a stupid slacker and by goddess, I am going to get a top grade no matter what. It was clear in that eight-week experience that we had not constituted ourselves as a team and that it was extremely difficult to do so in a distant-learning team of four spanning 16 time zones. So I suppose it was remarkable that we produced any result at all. It also seemed to me that the academic organization had no idea how to deliver a course that relied upon team conduct and team results. It may be that the forming teams of people who are at best casually related is doomed, but I also think that introducing this into the classroom is likely to be a case of the deaf misleading the blind. Indeed, for the other courses in which there were group/team projects, the requirement for teamwork was actually far less than in the software engineering course. Oddly, my greatest experience of teamwork was in a database course where we agreed on our data model in a Netmeeting session spanning eight time zones. A single episode of shared whiteboard and audio connection provided, for me, more experience of a team than anything else in the entire program. I have checked around a little bit with others who have performed in or delivered an academic software-engineering program, and the failure of teams and justification of cowboy behavior seems widespread. When I am most despairing over this, I tend to proclaim that software engineering is too important to be taught by computer scientists. For those of us raised in a self-styled high-individualism society, I say it takes recurring acts of personal courage to own a team result as our own and also continue to practice achieving powerful results under those conditions. Oddly, although portrayals of team sports all feature something about fashioning of genuine teamwork, it tends to be a celebration of the coach and the coach’s struggle when not a depiction of the brilliance of a single player. (The film Tin Cup provides a notable exception and I wonder how many detect that. The underlying theme of We Were Soldiers is also something to pay attention to, despite its cinematic focus on the commander and on notions of leadership.) For all of these reasons, I want to know more about this experiment in group incentive that Dubner cites:
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