So FTC kickoff was yesterday. This is the FTC
season setup. Granted, it's stretched out more than FRC would be even without SBD, but I really don't understand this argument that every team is going to do more and push harder longer or worse. The counterarguments to SBD seem to be both:
- People will procrastinate and end up rushing as much as they do now over a short time at the end.
- People will not procrastinate and will push as hard for the entire season as the do for the 6 week SBD version.
I don't get that. I don't buy this idea that the net is 'more'. Is it
longer? Yes. Will that make some teams struggle with the transition? Yes. But I find it much more likely that:
- Some teams will procrastinate and rush to finish at the end. People do this now, and they do it in every aspect of their lives. No rule can save it; no rule does. Some subset will catch on and fix themselves every year/between years, some not. I'll posit SBD won't fix this, and I can't predict the rate as more less than historically, both at the transition and at the new steady state.
- Some teams will go whole-hog for the entire season. These are likely to be teams that already go whole-hog for the entire season plus teams that think they can and rapidly realize they can't. I'd expect most in the latter will just stop doing that rather than quit, because this also happens now. But again, I'll posit some loss. (What I can't posit is this confidence that the net will absolutely be
worse than now. I don't get how you know this.)
- Some teams will slow down their schedule. I don't understand why this seems so weird to people. Our FTC program does not have an FRC schedule. Our VEX kids don't. Our FLL kids don't. Our sports programs don't. That hypothetical year-round official FRC training system doesn't. Nobody does.
People know how to do this stuff. Do they procrastinate? Of course, we're human, and mostly teenagers at that. But do they procrastinate
entirely to the point where the time to distribute their workload is not valuable? I guess there's one in every barrel, but I haven't seen it. This net retention rate--though I'm happy to admit all of the cohort sizes are unknown--is likely to
improve.
The goal of dropping SBD is not to make every team elite or even relatively* better. That's not what this is about. It's to let teams run their FRC lives the way they run the rest of their lives, sans arbitrary deadlines (but not sans real ones) and activation energies. This does not force anyone to do more; it just removes the activation energy for improvement to join those who already
do do more. Does this mean the elite have it 'easier' and will get better? Likely. But (in the nicest possible way) who
cares? It's not zero-sum; they're increasing their lead above the league average, not forcing everyone else down. Does it mean that some teams will overexert without that activation energy to stop them? Yes, some. And some will learn from it and some will leave. Does it mean that some will treat FRC like it's not an overwhelming N-week-crunch that sucks up our lives and then tries to make us stare at our failures with no way to fix them and inhibited room to learn from our experiences? I'm going with yes.
*Relatively better. The debate about whether overall quality matters and is affected by SBD has a different set of arguments, mostly 'there's already enough time for anyone to be good' versus 'it's a looong learning curve and no SBD means more inter-event improvement and community support'. The debate about whether overall quality affects inspiration is yet another debate entirely, centered around 'it's not about the robot' and 'sitting dead is really discouraging'. Still, the schedule control can be address independently as well to some extent.
EDIT:
I think I need to clarify what I mean by separating the debates: If someone agreed on the schedule impacts above but posited that quality or inspiration from it didn't change, the conclusion would be that dropping SBD is marginally good or a wash. (Marginally good because teams ability to time-manage 6 weeks versus N similarly doesn't excuse the imposition of an arbitrary deadline any more than it would elsewhere in life.) This isn't to say I don't have strong opinions about quality and inspiration or that these don't need to be addressed before a conclusion. I just want to call out the schedule separately because I get the impression that I expect an order of magnitude less
positive change than I think pro-SBDers expect in the negative from burnout or mass procrastination.