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Unread 05-05-2013, 20:51
Ian Curtis Ian Curtis is offline
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FRC #1778 (Chill Out!)
Team Role: Engineer
 
Join Date: Feb 2005
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Location: Puget Sound
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

There are a lot of people that seem to be saying they are flirting with burnout even with a 6.5 week build season. I don't think we should consider this healthy!

If FIRST is coming close to burning out the core mentors that are involved enough to post on CD, we are definitely also coming close to burning out the mentors that are not posting on CD. Even if you don't like the idea of the unlimited build season, I think it is pretty clear we have to try something else.

For me, having one or two nights a week where I can just go home after work is awesome. After 10 years of robots, I know work expands to fill the available time, and as deadlines close in work just seems to get done. I know for 1778, I plan to meet much less next season than we did this year, and fully expect to build a much more competitive robot. (Conveniently we set the bar fairly low )

There seem to be a lot of people in this thread that are against the unlimited build season because they are worried about the top tier running away with the medals. As Adam said, I don't think that is likely. The 67s of the world are really far down the learning curve. IMO, a switch to the unlimited build season will result in less work to a top tier team, since you don't have to apply all your fixes to the practice robot and then your real robot. If you cannot put in the time to be top tier now, isn't reducing that number of hours a good thing for all of us? Those that observe a 6.5 week build season instead of the 16 week build season are already limiting themselves from the allowable build time, so I don't see why switching to the unlimited build makes you any less able to limit yourself.

The one strong argument I do see for Stop Build Day is that it means that everyone has a good night's sleep prior to the event, and no one is staying up late the night before finishing their machine and showing up grumpy. I did this too many times in FLL.

When I started reading this thread, I was very firmly in the "Stop Build Day" camp. But the more I think about it, the more I think we do it out of tradition instead of value added.
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CHILL OUT! | Aero Stability & Control Engineer
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