Professionalism

How senior design teams fail

• Week 4. Somebody notices a teammate has stopped showing up
• Week 4. Nobody says anything
• Week 7. The team routes around them. It works
• Week 12. An integration nobody owns is late
• Week 15. "X did nothing all semester" appears on four peer evaluations

Attack the problem, not the person

A team problem is a defect

flowchart LR
    O["<b>Observe</b><br/>Describe the behavior"] --> A["<b>Analyze</b><br/>Explain the impact"]
    A --> I["<b>Investigate</b><br/>Ask for their perspective"]
    I --> F["<b>Fix</b><br/>Agree on a path forward"]
    F -.->|"it recurs"| O

Observe

"You never do anything."

"#41 was assigned to you on Sep 14. It's Oct 2, the branch has no commits, and the demo is on the 9th."

You already have the evidence

• The board
• git log
• The pull request
• The channel

But not this

Analyze

Investigate

• What's going on with #41?
• Is something blocking you?
• Did I misunderstand what you'd taken on?
• What would help?

Then stop talking.

Fix

An owner, an action, and a date. Written down.

Six you will meet this term

• The Ghost. Three unanswered messages, nine days, an empty branch
• The Nine-Minute Tax. Always late. Five people wait. That's forty-five minutes of your team, every week
• "Yeah, I'll take that." Volunteers for everything in the meeting. Delivers none of it
• Merged, Unread. The agent wrote it, they pasted it, nobody read it, their name is on it
• The Rubber Stamp. "LGTM" on nine hundred lines, forty seconds after it opened
• The Hero. Silent for three weeks, then two thousand lines at 11pm before the demo

Same six, said out loud

• Ghost → "You've missed two meetings and #41 hasn't started. What's going on?"
• Nine-Minute Tax → "The last four meetings started late waiting for you. Can you make 4:00, or should we move it?"
• Merged, Unread → "Walk me through why this swallows the exception."

Five rules

• Talk early. Within 48 hours
• Use evidence
• Connect it to project goals
• Ask before assuming
• End with an agreement

Unread agent output

"Walk me through why this swallows the exception."

"The agent wrote it"

Your name on the pull request is the claim.

When it's aimed at you

• Ask what they observed
• Say what happened, undecorated
• Agree the action

If it doesn't work

• Your team. Almost everything ends here
• Your TA. Bring the evidence and the agreement that wasn't kept
• Me. Improvement plan, then professionalism review

Pair up. Neither of you is you

Sam took a use case three weeks ago. Two missed meetings. Nine days, no answer in the channel.

Round one: open with the label

Say it exactly like that.

Round two: Sam has a reason

Sam, pick one. Do not say which.

• Two jobs since August
• Stuck, and too embarrassed to say so
• Something at home
• Thought somebody else had picked it up

Friday

• Your team's first hour together
• Fix the weekly meeting time you'll defend all term
• Sign the contract. Clause 7 is this lecture, in your words
• Your TA verifies Checkpoint 0 at your table