He beat me to death with stupidity. Nothing will top this guy.
Ok first the setting. This is important. We have a promising computer science student, in his fourth year, with plans to continue to get his masters.
This student has a 11.0 GPA.
We are in a 3rd year Real Time systems class together. Last semester he was in my 4th year distributed programming class, That class was much harder than the real time one, covered much of the same topics, so I knew right away that this guy would be good to team with.
My third partner was just someone I have seen in classes since I started school. I figured he has not flunked out so must know something.
But the real win was this A student, I am going to call him Yiffing.
So with our team formed, we got right down to business. Since Yiffing had been in the previous class with me, I pointed out some code from the notes of that class that would give us a suitable solution for our project. Granted it might had been a bit more complex than the prof was expecting, but with both myself and Yiffing being experienced in this shit, we figured it was a safe bet and we could help the 3rd member keep up.
So we divided our tasks. I finished mine the night after the meeting and then I waited for the rest of the team to finish their first round of tasks.
and waited.
and waited.
Finally emailing them, they had not started, would get to it that night.
Then I waited a few more days, finally getting sick of waiting since the first milestone was due in 48 hours, I did almost all of the tasks.
Yiffing finally got back to me, his code was wrong. His task had two parts, write data to a file and read data from the same file.
what he did was google write data to a file, found the first solution and cut and pasted it into his code.
then googled the second solution, cut and pasted that into the code.
I actually found the code he cut and pasted.
http://www.java-tips.org/java-se-tips/java.io/how-to-read-file-in-java.html
http://www.java-tips.org/java-se-tips/java.io/how-to-write-file-in-java.html
he cut and pasted that, word for word, both into the same file. So not only was it useless in terms of our project (he had to write data specific to our project to the file), but it was useless because you cannot just cut and past like that.
I did not become... "worried" at this point. I did not "suspect" something, no right then and there I knew I had a fucking moron on the team. So I quizzed him a bit about our design, an online distributed pong game(yeah lame I know), and not only did he have no idea about anything in our design taken from the notes from the class we had previously, he didn't even know what pong was, nor had he bothered to look it up.
But, I was determined this motherfucker was going to contribute. So I gave him another task. I am not going to get technical about this, instead I will get metaphorical so everyone can appreciate this.
Picture a garden, the garden is some ways away from a source of water. It needs this resource to do what gardens do. Lets say the garden is a cactus garden, mostly to amuse me.
So a ways off is a stream. In between the stream and the cactus garden is an aqueduct. Yiffings task was to program a Person(thread) that would take buckets of water out of the stream and dump the water into the aqueduct. Then program a second person (Thread) waiting at the garden end of the aqueduct with another bucket, filling it up as water came, and watering the cacti.
What Yiffing coded was a pregnant nun fucking a waterbuffalo on the aqueduct, and a fat man wearing a diaper shoving cacti up his ass.
If you want details, email me because the above aptly explains all.
This went on all semester. The tasks I gave him got easier and easier. Finally he had to do something akin to this (even the non programmers will get it)
he had to change a function that looked like this:
void foo()
to:
void foo(int i)
you do that by typing in "int i" in between the ().
what Yiffing did was
void foo() = foo(int i)
Not kidding.
I had a google wave open. we were collaborating (actually I was watching penn and teller bullshit and yiffing was shitting his pants) but here is a portion of the conversation.
{YIFFING}I already checked in. actually, when i used the target->build, it built well. but...when it came to command line.... (Yeah target->build was building another project, one he did not touch, so of course it built)
(some time passed as I looked at the code he checked in)
{ME}I dont want to sound mean but .. man, cmon. we learned this stuff first year.
{YIFFING} so the target->build works well?
{ME}no, it was almost 99% wrong. very few things were correct. I am correcting them and your assignment is to compare the version I check in with the version you checked in and get back to me when you understand what it is I did. I am almost done. (I looked at his shit code and just reverted to a previous version and did his task myself, took me 3 min, he was at it for over 2 hours)
{YIFFING} target->build works right now since i don't get any error in that way
{ME} target->build is building the java project. not the c project.
{YIFFING} ???
{ME} YOU GOT ERRORS BECAUSE YOU WERE WRONG. THE CODE WAS INCORRECT. BADLY INCORRECT.
{YIFFING} Conflicts...what should i do ??
{ME} What I did when I had conflicts was that I figured it out. That was my method, I would figure it out.
{ME} Google the term "Shaving a Yak".
He is going for his masters.
He is going to graduate with a masters in computer science. He is 4th year like me. Professors not only pass this guy, but give him good grades.
This student has a 11.0 GPA.
We are in a 3rd year Real Time systems class together. Last semester he was in my 4th year distributed programming class, That class was much harder than the real time one, covered much of the same topics, so I knew right away that this guy would be good to team with.
My third partner was just someone I have seen in classes since I started school. I figured he has not flunked out so must know something.
But the real win was this A student, I am going to call him Yiffing.
So with our team formed, we got right down to business. Since Yiffing had been in the previous class with me, I pointed out some code from the notes of that class that would give us a suitable solution for our project. Granted it might had been a bit more complex than the prof was expecting, but with both myself and Yiffing being experienced in this shit, we figured it was a safe bet and we could help the 3rd member keep up.
So we divided our tasks. I finished mine the night after the meeting and then I waited for the rest of the team to finish their first round of tasks.
and waited.
and waited.
Finally emailing them, they had not started, would get to it that night.
Then I waited a few more days, finally getting sick of waiting since the first milestone was due in 48 hours, I did almost all of the tasks.
Yiffing finally got back to me, his code was wrong. His task had two parts, write data to a file and read data from the same file.
what he did was google write data to a file, found the first solution and cut and pasted it into his code.
then googled the second solution, cut and pasted that into the code.
I actually found the code he cut and pasted.
http://www.java-tips.org/java-se-tips/java.io/how-to-read-file-in-java.html
http://www.java-tips.org/java-se-tips/java.io/how-to-write-file-in-java.html
he cut and pasted that, word for word, both into the same file. So not only was it useless in terms of our project (he had to write data specific to our project to the file), but it was useless because you cannot just cut and past like that.
I did not become... "worried" at this point. I did not "suspect" something, no right then and there I knew I had a fucking moron on the team. So I quizzed him a bit about our design, an online distributed pong game(yeah lame I know), and not only did he have no idea about anything in our design taken from the notes from the class we had previously, he didn't even know what pong was, nor had he bothered to look it up.
But, I was determined this motherfucker was going to contribute. So I gave him another task. I am not going to get technical about this, instead I will get metaphorical so everyone can appreciate this.
Picture a garden, the garden is some ways away from a source of water. It needs this resource to do what gardens do. Lets say the garden is a cactus garden, mostly to amuse me.
So a ways off is a stream. In between the stream and the cactus garden is an aqueduct. Yiffings task was to program a Person(thread) that would take buckets of water out of the stream and dump the water into the aqueduct. Then program a second person (Thread) waiting at the garden end of the aqueduct with another bucket, filling it up as water came, and watering the cacti.
What Yiffing coded was a pregnant nun fucking a waterbuffalo on the aqueduct, and a fat man wearing a diaper shoving cacti up his ass.
If you want details, email me because the above aptly explains all.
This went on all semester. The tasks I gave him got easier and easier. Finally he had to do something akin to this (even the non programmers will get it)
he had to change a function that looked like this:
void foo()
to:
void foo(int i)
you do that by typing in "int i" in between the ().
what Yiffing did was
void foo() = foo(int i)
Not kidding.
I had a google wave open. we were collaborating (actually I was watching penn and teller bullshit and yiffing was shitting his pants) but here is a portion of the conversation.
{YIFFING}I already checked in. actually, when i used the target->build, it built well. but...when it came to command line.... (Yeah target->build was building another project, one he did not touch, so of course it built)
(some time passed as I looked at the code he checked in)
{ME}I dont want to sound mean but .. man, cmon. we learned this stuff first year.
{YIFFING} so the target->build works well?
{ME}no, it was almost 99% wrong. very few things were correct. I am correcting them and your assignment is to compare the version I check in with the version you checked in and get back to me when you understand what it is I did. I am almost done. (I looked at his shit code and just reverted to a previous version and did his task myself, took me 3 min, he was at it for over 2 hours)
{YIFFING} target->build works right now since i don't get any error in that way
{ME} target->build is building the java project. not the c project.
{YIFFING} ???
{ME} YOU GOT ERRORS BECAUSE YOU WERE WRONG. THE CODE WAS INCORRECT. BADLY INCORRECT.
{YIFFING} Conflicts...what should i do ??
{ME} What I did when I had conflicts was that I figured it out. That was my method, I would figure it out.
{ME} Google the term "Shaving a Yak".
He is going for his masters.
He is going to graduate with a masters in computer science. He is 4th year like me. Professors not only pass this guy, but give him good grades.