Programming for money
 

To all teams,

The team that I mentor is going to program team's robots for money. We need the money in order to compete next year. If you team needs their robot to be programmed please let me know.

Re: Programming for money
 

Against gracious professionalism? Not sure if this is a troll or not because you only have one post.

Re: Programming for money
 

I'm just trying to help out other teams by programming their robot for money.

Re: Programming for money
 

You're off to a rocky start. You might want to rethink your marketing strategy.

Re: Programming for money
 

:o

The point of frc is to learn... not to pay someone else to do work for you, that's school.

Re: Programming for money
 

Seems completely GP to me. I'm sure there are two teams out there who would find this mutually beneficial.

Seems anti first to me.

Re: Programming for money
 

This sort of goes against Gracious Professionalism, but it certainly goes against the spirit of FIRST. A better strategy (more inline with FIRST values and GP) would be charging to TEACH students programming.

Re: Programming for money
 

I'm sure there are plenty of teams that have provided compensation to another team or a sponsor in exchange for, say, machined parts.

Just because something is new/strange/you don't like it doesn't mean it is "anti FIRST" or "un GP".

That said, I think the OP could have proposed his/her idea a bit better and don't think it is feasible to completely program and debug a different teams robot from scratch in a reasonable timeframe :)

Re: Programming for money
 

I don't think it is un GP necessarily... that said I wonder if that was allowed why can't we just go to the top robotics firms in the world and say "Here's a fist full of cash, design us a robot. We will be back in 6 weeks to pick it up".

Re: Programming for money
 

Aside from being boring, you have to account non-team labor costs on the BOM

Re: Programming for money
 

See if you can get one of those firms to build it for you for less than $4000 (R9).

I would fully expect any team taking up this offer to include the cost of the services on the BOM - you're purchasing a part (code) for the robot.

For what it's worth, my team is willing to help any other team figure out their code and teach them a few things along the way. We've been do it free for many years now, and annually present to a room full of other team sat the MN Splash event in December all we know about programming robots in java.

Re: Programming for money
 

Stop throwing around words like non or un GP. Not all teams have ready resources or even students who want to learn programming.

If a team wishes to use their resources to hire someone to help them with something it's their choice.

Re: Programming for money
 

Better make that $400:

Re: Programming for money
 

My assumption (possibly a bad one) was that a team willing to do this would work out specific invoicing carefully enough to get past the $400 limit.

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
 

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.

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
 

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:
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
 

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.