[thefro526]

I've been thinking a lot about this thread lately, and figured I'd post up some of my more recent thoughts/experiences.

Since 2011, my employer has been nice enough to sponsor whatever robotics team I've been affiliated with. The exact details vary a bit from season to season, but one thing that has always remained the same was a sort of 'unlimited' access to our sister companies resources as a machine shop. In 2011, we (at the time, we = 816) used them for a few small parts during the early build season and then not again until maybe week 3 or so of competition season, then in 2012 we outsourced a large portion of our robot to them and in 2013 after making the transition to 341, we had them run a lot of the sheet parts that you see on our robot this year - along with some of the 1/4" Plate Work.

In all three of those years, I was put in a very interesting position with my employer and my co-workers. To someone who didn't know the exact circumstances of the sponsorship agreement, it would appear as if I was shirking my responsibilies at work to play robots - when in reality robotics had become part of what I was 'supposed' to be working on while at work. (Protecting an investment sort of thing.)

Things get deeper from there, but to spare you much of the details here's the short and sweet... In both 2012 and 2013 there were parts orders that were sent to the machine shop through me that needed to be done on a schedule that would allow enough time for us to get the subsystems they were intended for done in time to ship the robot. This meant that the machine shop had to turn them around quicker than they usually would for nearly any customer and of course, if one thing needs to be done sooner than something else, that other thing is going to slip by the amount of time that the first takes.

In my case, the robot parts 'bumped' parts for a project that I am responsible for during my day job and things got really, really ugly for a bit. Much of what followed was the result of poor understanding at different levels and my failure to communicate exactly what was going on to my superiors and has since been resolved, but I can honestly say that weeks 5 and 6 of build season in both 2012 and 2013 have been two of the most stressful periods of my 'adult' life.

I guess the TLDR here is that the 6 week build season can really strain relationships between teams and sponsors - especially when employees of a sponsor are members/mentors/associates of the team.** Reducing the strain is possible through proper planning and a more 'structured' team/sponsor relationship I'm sure - but another more easy way to do this would be by relaxing the deadlines given to these people in an effort to reduce the amount of situations where we (teams) are asking for 'So Much' in 'So little time.'

** An interesting (annoying) thing that I have seen is that more often than not, the team that an employee is working with is referred to as 'Their Team' - when in reality, it should be something like 'The Team' or 'Team XXX'. This sort of reflects how a robotics team is thought of from an Employers Standpoint when that Employer Sponsors a team and Employees are involved. The Employees working with the team can often be held responsible for the teams actions since it is 'Their Team'.