Chief Delphi - Programming for money

Chief Delphi (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/index.php)

- Java (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=184)

- - Programming for money (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=133936)

Re: Programming for money

I am not sure how selling programing time is any different than selling extrusions or a swerve drive module.

Of course as other have said, it becomes a COTs item and needs to meet all the COTs item rules. Including it needs to be an established company & ready to meet reasonable demands of all team? If the team modifies the code it then becomes a modified part. Not legal for next year's robot?

Re: Programming for money

Quote:

Originally Posted by FrankJ (Post 1438195)

How would this be any different than example 6? I could even argue that it doesn't even need to be included in the BOM. It's just 2 teams making donations to each other.

Quote:

R11 The BOM cost of each non-KOP item must be calculated based on the unit fair market value for the material and/or labor, except for labor provided by Team members (including sponsor employees who are members of the team), members of other Teams, event provided Machine Shops and shipping.

EXAMPLE 1: A Team orders a custom bracket made by a company to the Team’s specification. The company’s material cost and normally charged labor rate apply.
EXAMPLE 2: A Team receives a donated sensor. The company would normally sell this item for $52 USD, which is therefore its fair market value.
EXAMPLE 3: Special price discounts from National Instruments and other FRC Suppliers are being offered to all FIRST Teams. The discounted purchase price of items from these sources may be used in the additional parts accounting calculations.
EXAMPLE 4: A Team purchases steel bar stock for $10 USD and has it machined by a local machine shop. The machine shop is not considered a team Sponsor, but donates two (2) hours of expended labor anyway. The Team must include the estimated normal cost of the labor as if it were paid to the machine shop, and add it to the $10 USD.
EXAMPLE 5: A Team purchases steel bar stock for $10 USD and has it machined by a local machine shop that is a recognized Sponsor of the Team. If the machinists are considered members of the Team, their labor costs do not apply. The total applicable cost for the part would be $10 USD.

It is in the best interests of the Teams and FIRST to form relationships with as many organizations as possible. Teams are encouraged to
be expansive in recruiting and including organizations in their team, as that exposes more people and organizations to FIRST. Recognizing
supporting companies as Sponsors of, and members in, the Team is encouraged, even if the involvement of the Sponsor is solely through the
donation of fabrication labor.

EXAMPLE 6: A Team purchases steel bar stock for $10 USD and has it machined by another Team. The total applicable cost for the part
would be $10 USD.
EXAMPLE 7: A Team purchases a 4 by 4 ft sheet of aluminum, but only uses a piece 10 by 10 in. on their ROBOT. The Team identifies a source that sells aluminum sheet in 1 by 1 ft pieces. The Team may cost their part on the basis of a 1 by 1 ft piece, even though they cut the piece from a larger bulk purchase. They do not have to account for the entire 4 by 4 ft bulk purchase item.

Re: Programming for money

I don't this this need to go in the way of whether of not its gp, I know if a team needed help programming their robot or couldn't get their code working I would be more than willing to get their code working free of charge. And i'm sure I know a lot of other people would be willing to help each other out. I just think there are a lot of people that would be willing to do the same thing free of charge.

Re: Programming for money

Quote:

Originally Posted by notmattlythgoe (Post 1438198)

How would this be any different than example 6? I could even argue that it doesn't even need to be included in the BOM. It's just 2 teams making donations to each other.

The difference is the other Team is not donating time, they are charging for it.

On the other hand a literal reading of R11 doesn't address if the time is donated or paid for so maybe you are right. Only the GDC for future games knows for sure. :eek:

Re: Programming for money

IMO, it's a troll looking to poke at a larger subject which may actually have longer-term ramifications. I think the applicable rule which allows this is <R11>, as outlined in Example 1:

Quote:

Originally Posted by <R11> Example 1

The company’s material cost and normally charged labor rate apply

FIRST would have a very hard time governing this. Paying for software development is a very tricky game in and of itself. What if the client isn't happy? Sure they'll get negative rep. but there goes a team's season. What if the client keeps changing what they want and therefore will never be happy? The programmer may not even get paid. What if such-and-such breaches the contract and now the team's school is being sued - is FIRST liable - parents are very litigation-happy, after all.

Even if a team can navigate that, the considerations do not stop there. Professional consultants with 10 years of documented positive testimonials can easily get $75-$100/hr for a high-value client. College students who've worked closed problems for 4 years, more like $16-$21/hr (pretty typical for an internship). FIRST alumni who did FRC programming for 4 years could probably net more than $16/hr due to the specialty, but how much more given the total cap on robot expenditures? What regional ramifications are there for programmer pay - a programmer who's worth $100/hr in San Fransisco isn't worth half that in rural Georgia simply due to cost of living adjustments, yet each must live within the $4k robot cost.

GP in this context is irrelevant. The client & consultant aren't competing with each other, nor is there necessarily a public disclosure of the details of an arrangement. It's a non-traditional and perhaps therefore frowned-upon" practice. Yet for hungry college kids who aren't looking to swindle a team, it could be a highly mutually beneficial experience.

A curious question IMO, is whether or not it's GP for Team A to enact a non-compete agreement with a programmer so the programmer doesn't help Team B who's 10 minutes down the road.

Edit - totally missed that this is a team being paid for another team's services. If there are governing entities involved (like school districts) add another layer of bureaucracy, yet otherwise the same issues apply. Otherwise the Team performing the services becomes the "company" in <R11>.

My first instinct is that this seems counter to the spirit of the competition. In retrospect go though I don't see how this is materially different from a team outsourcing the manufacturing of physical rebook parts to a company. It is quite possible that there are teams that are interested primarily in the building and not programming of a robot. for those teams they can still learn quite a bit from just the actual manufacturing of the machine minus the programming and still be inspired, perhaps even more so if programming has been your Achilles' heel in the past.

Re: Programming for money

Quote:

Originally Posted by matthewdenny (Post 1438622)

So by equivalency could a team interested in programming ask a hardware design group to design them a robot to meet the challenge and receive a parts list and cad drawings? Then assemble the robot per spec so that they can program it?

In my mind, it's one thing to design a cad drawing and then have it laser cut or fabricated-- it was your design. It's another to farm out the actual design work.

How would this conversation go over at St. Louis?

FRC kid 1: Wow! That's an exciting autonomous you have there-- you carry all 3 containers and a stack of totes to the center *every* time!
FRC kid 2: Yeah-- we paid a firm to write that for us-- it was well worth it! We were clueless how to even start but they said if we added encoders here, and there and switches here and there that they could make it work so that's what we did!

Re: Programming for money

When most teams send a part or system out for custom manufacture, it's mostly because they do not have the necessary equipment (lathe, CNC, laser cutter, mill, welder). To get good results, they have to figure out just what the piece should be so that it can do the job. The bottom line is that the team solved the problem, and the "contractor" implemented it. This is considered normal in FRC, though some teams can obviously afford a lot more of it than others.

Programming the robot is something that every team should have the equipment to do. There's enough stuff in the rookie KOP, and updates in each year's veterans' KOP. There is every expectation that even a minimally funded team could learn to program a robot. As such, this is something we really shouldn't see.

If a team turned over a physical robot to a programming "contractor" with a "make it score points" direction, that would definitely not be within the intent of FRC. However, if the the "client" team defines what the program must do (e.g. when limit switch A is engaged, motor B is only allowed to be stopped or in reverse), then I can certainly see the argument that the team has "solved" the problem and the "contractor" has implemented it.

Re: Programming for money

If this person really needed money he would post more detail explaining how he can help teams. They would also post about how much experience they have coding robots.