[Holtzman]

In my professional life, I work for a company that builds custom automated systems for the food industry. When the jobs get handed off to our engineering department we’ve got our budget, the design constraints, and a ship date. The design constraints can, and do often change along the way, but rarely does the ship date get pushed back. Sound familiar?

When we quote a new system to a customer, the customers are looking at how much we’re going to charge them, the quality of our work, and how quickly we can deliver the equipment. There are often many cases where we are not the cheapest quote, but since we can deliver a quality product faster, we win the contract.

Once our ship date comes around, if we’re not ready, we face financial penalties, and potential loss of future contracts. If something breaks or doesn’t work 100% on startup, we often fabricate warrantee replacement or upgrade parts (at our cost), and travel to the end users facility to install and troubleshoot the new components. Sound familiar?

I look at our 6 week build season as exactly the same situation. It’s not just who can build the best robot, but who can build the best robot in 6 weeks. I have a real appreciation for the teams that can come out in week 1 or 2 guns blazing, and set the bar for the rest of the season. The 6 week season is a great analogy for real world design projects, and I feel it is a must for FIRST. The withholding allowance is also very realistic, although I’d personally like to see it reduced to about 10 lbs or so, and exclude spare parts from it. Teams could still repair mechanisms that become damaged, but not replace or add entire mechanisms, minibot launchers, ball magnets, Frisbee pickups, etc.

In regards to mentor burnout, we are a very competitive team and we take our on field performance very seriously. If FIRST were to open the season wide open, we would work every bit as hard as we do during the current build season, right up until the championship. Any team who wanted to be a contender would be forced to do the same.

We would approach the season in one of two ways. Don’t compete at any early season events in order to maximize our testing and debugging time. Or build two completely different robots, one that was good enough to win an early regional and qualify, and another potentially completely different one designed and built for the championship. The second one would probably not be started until after week 1 of regionals, and would never compete before the championship.

I would be forced to seriously reconsider my involvement in FIRST as a result of the toll it would take on my health, and personal/professional lives. This is largely because of my competitive personality, and complete inability to lead a balanced lifestyle. My take on the whole idea, the FIRST season is great the way it is. Don’t change a thing.

If you want to see the most competitive and capable robots battling it out at the championship, open it up more, but be prepared to see some negative side effects as a result. If you want less mentor burnout, keep it at 6 weeks or less, get rid of the withholding allowance, and don’t allow any fabrication or software development after bag day, but don’t be surprised when we have lots of brave little toasters taking the field.