Quote:
Originally Posted by Hallry
One must remember, there are now 2,500 teams in FIRST. This would require employees of FIRST to dedicate much time towards this, instead of other possible work.
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Exactly.
Do you know how many people work at FIRST, on staff?
I think they MAYBE hit 100 total employees this year.
(Source: I interned in the Marketing department this summer).
That divides many ways, into each of the programs (Jr.FLL, FLL, FTC, FRC), and then things like HR, IT, Volunteer Resources, Marketing, Finance, and the list goes on...
There's not a whole lot of people who actually
WORK FOR FRC.
When people get fired up about change not happening fast enough (this is not to say that change doesn't need to happen, I absolutely agree- FRC needs some fixes...), I think this point needs to be brought up:
Please remember that the FRC staff is smaller than the average FRC team.
There are 2500 of you, and one of them.
When you (the royal 'you', not anyone in this thread specifically- I'm talking really generally, here) say that that 'FRC ISN'T DOING THIS RIGHT', you're not calling out some big corporate structure. You're literally calling out a group of ...15, 20 people, maybe? Who all work REALLY hard at their jobs. Implementing any big change requires a lot of work from those 15.
I'm all for improving things and making changes, but you've got to remember you're dealing with humans on the other end of this. Human beings who work really hard on their jobs and quite frankly could use a lot more 'thank you's' than they currently get. Piling more work onto their plates isn't a great solution, unless FRC were to suddenly hire 15 more people. (I've always said FIRST could use a cloning machine - so many great and ambitious people, so little time.)
That said, I like the draft system idea - and I definitely think the current method needs some change! It would just have to be developed and implemented in a way that doesn't bog down FRC staff with more stuff to do in such a crazy time of year. (Also keep in mind, just because it's a computer system doesn't mean it can just be ignored - someone has to keep an eye on that too- computers aren't perfect.)