I'm not clear enough in what git is doing to explain this much better, but here's what I think is happening...
You make some changes to code in folders A, B, and C, while I'm working in P, Q, and R.
I set up a branch and do a pull from master. It updates the files in my local A, B, and C folders, because you made changes to them. I'm not touching them.
I make some changes to P then go home.
In the morning I come in and do a git pull and get a bunch of stuff from A and C that you've been working on today.
I finish up work on P, commit it, try to push it, and then I get a warning from git saying it cannot push because of a conflict in some files in A.
So I have to stop what I'm doing and figure out what in the hell is the problem with files in a unit I had nothing to do with that's preventing me from pushing my changes in P into master. I've got customer service people pestering me to get these changes pushed into production ASAP, and you're at lunch, and whatever I do to proceed is going to screw up your work.
This is what we're running into.
I'm probably not even explaining it fully accurately, and it probably suggests we're doing something wrong.
But all that sticks in my mind is that this issue is arising because of timing dependencies between when you pushed some stuff to git, when it got copied down to my local repo, when you then made some updates, caused a conflict yourself, and that got pulled to my local repo before you resolved it. So that left it to ME to resolve locally.
In these situations (which have come up at least a dozen times in the past couple of weeks), I can neither pull nor push anything until I "resolve" the issues in YOUR code on MY local repo.
I notify my boss who goes haywire, immediately sets up an emergency video conf call with 8 people, and we all spend 45 minutes trying to fix this mess. And the bottom-line is that people point their fingers at ME for screwing something up. All I know is, I did not touch any of the files in either A, B, or C, and everybody gets their knickers in a wad when I say that because it makes me sound defensive and trying to shift the blame.
From MY perspective, I just keep asking, "Why in the world can't I just work on the files in folders assigned to me and not have to deal with all these other folders getting their files updated and having issues when they have nothing to do with anything I'm working on?"
I'm still relatively new here, and the guy who has been single-handedly maintaining this code for the past several years left, but he made it all look like a walk in the park. We are now tripping over ourselves every other day with weird stuff like this that everybody says should not be happening.
I'm pretty sure we're doing something wrong in how we're interacting with git. But we've been given three different scripts to follow now, and they all seem to result in the same problems coming up, but at different times and contexts.