The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by Don Wright

Are you saying that a team in week 5 will wait until the week 1 districts/regionals and then copy the best designs?

Wasn't it 469 that used to have a reputation (c. 2005?) for making big changes at their first event? If so, were those changes independent of what happened in week 1?

[AllenGregoryIV]

Everyone who knows me knows that I am all for getting rid of the 6 week build season.

My team meets 7 days a week during build season and 7 days a week during competition season too(except for the Wednesday after bag and when I'm away at competition).

The best teams are building for 16 weeks either way and spending a lot of time and money doing it.

My main problem with the 6 week build season is we have so little time to help struggling teams. We do two rookie workshops, a bumper build and hold a scrimmage which is really just more time to work on robots. All of these events plus teams coming to our shop on various days still isn't enough time to get some teams competitive. If we had up until right before competition we could have several more practice events to get robots ready for actual competition. The few teams with copy bots in our area already do this, why should we exclude those teams without the resources (yes I know they can go out and work to get the resources, it doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make it easier for them).

[Dmentor]

Originally Posted by MikeL303

Why do mentors get burned out?

I usually burn out because somewhere along the way robotics transitions from fun to a job. Since I'm already working a (more than) full time job, I get intellectually tired and stressed out the farther build season progresses. Also my sleeping patterns are disturbed during build season most significantly because my brain is constantly engaged wrestling with the problem(s) of the day more often robotics related than work. My burn out correlates directly with my commitment to the team. If I was less committed I'd be less engaged and less stressed out.

My burn out is generally temporary. A few weeks off and I'm eager to watch webcasts and do a little light weight robotics R&D but I'm unable to sustain any real heavy lifting for months. Come build season time I'm ready to go again.

The real source of my burn out is myself. I don't do enough in the lead up to build season to protect myself. These are the concrete actions that I know I need to take but don't seem to find the time (mostly because they are intellectually less appealing than playing with robots):
1. Recruit more mentors to the team
2. Train more team members (students and mentors alike)
3. Organize better so that we can more effectively use all our team members
4. Build a better community support structure so that we are all helping each other throughout the season rather than letting the load fall on a select few.

[Adam Freeman]

Originally Posted by JesseK

Forget the build cycle, the practice bots, etc.

The level of dedication required to sustain a successful technical career and a successful team as a mentor will continue to rise, eventually beyond a tipping point, for a team that wants to make it into Eliminations or better at Championships. The technical job market, where nerds compete to have meaningful impact on the projects at work for which they're passionate, is far more competitive than even IRI. A wife & house on top of that is hard enough, but add kids into the mix and it'd get tougher still.

Mentors are the keystone to the level of competitiveness in FRC -- and any student on a highly competitive team is better for it in the long run. Some geographic areas lack one type of mentor or another (for example, my area is light on the mechanical side but is overflowing with software & business). One solution is to get more mentors involved -- but how, on a sustainable basis? Another is to partner teams up who are heavy on one, yet light on another, but that's another topic for another thread (and something we're trying for 2014).

The posts quoted after me in this thread showcase an interesting few points, and I waited to respond to Adam until a few more people came in. My original statement wasn't to start an argument, but really to start a discussion on how 341 and other very successful teams are able to motivate their team to excellence for 4 months of out of the year. Is there a core of mentors who can come in when needed? Is there 'that 1 guy who loves the robot more than life'? Are the kids told 'the mentors are here, and so you shall be as well"? We've tried a variety of things on my team, with mixed results. I'd love to hear what works for a given team's circumstances.

I think that the specific discussion regarding removal of the 6-week cap is far bigger than ChiefDelphi. There are many voices which aren't represented on these forums. The 9-person team I talked to last night (1 technical mentor) doesn't have anyone who even reads CD, for example.

Jesse,

I agree with your statement here. Yes, comitting time was much easier 10 years ago (when I was a lowly engineer) than now. I've made plenty of decisions or non decisions that may or may not have adversly affected my career. These are all conscious decisions to continue with this program instead of making advancement in other areas (although there are plenty of other factors that went into the decisions). Once my kids were born, it became even harder, to commit additional time. One of the reasons we work the schedule we do, is because there is no way to commit any additional time.

This season was terrible for burn-out. Trying to get a climber developed and build put such a strain on all aspects of our robot that many of us were ready to walk away after this season. But, after seeing it all come together and having a great experience at MSC / Championships...I don't think (hope) we will lose any mentors.

To keep the team working for the entire 4 months of the year, we have a couple "really" dedicated mentors that are around all the time to help get stuff done. They really are the backbone of our entire operation. The rest of us provide the knowledge base for what we are going to do and how to do it, but they are the ones that really get it done. There's no way I could invest any additional time than I already do...but, I still think it would be easier to spread that time out over the entire season, than trying to cram it into 6 weeks.

Our core group of mentors is not getting any younger. So to help counter act this, we are looking into opening up our mentor base to former students that we feel would be able to develop into mentors. In addition to any former FIRST students that hire into the GM proving grounds that would be interested in helping out.

I agree... CD is a very small minority of the total teams in FIRST. Nothing is going to decided here, but it is a fun discussion!

[Brian Selle]

For our team, the "stop build" day was last Saturday. We basically work 100% until we are eliminated. Having to build and maintain a practice robot costs us 2x and increases our workload by a significant amount. At each competition there is a massive push and stress to update the bagged robot to the current state. How nice would it be to show up to the competition and be ready to go?

There are teams that stop building at 6-weeks and their mentors get a break. I get it and respect it. However, without a stop build day your season can still be 6 weeks long... just go to a week 1 event and your done (maybe FIRST could even move it up a week). Right now, if you go to a week 5 event you will be competing against teams that have worked for 11 weeks... the stop build day accomplished nothing.

For our team, removing the 6-week stop build day would not "extend" the build season at all... rather it would reduce cost and mentor burnout.

[Don Wright]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

Wasn't it 469 that used to have a reputation (c. 2005?) for making big changes at their first event? If so, were those changes independent of what happened in week 1?

Granted 2005 was before my time with 469... Do we make changes? Yes. Are they sometimes big? Yes. Do they sometimes resemble other good designs (like 1114's arm in 2007 because ours sucked)? Very occasionally. But most of the time the changes were because we weren't really done at our first event... In fact the running joke/motto on the team was "We'll just finish it on Thursday at our first event..."

In 2008 we wanted to "shoot the ball" but thought it would be deemed illegal. After we won Detroit and saw 27's awesome robot and how much fun and cool it was, we spent the next day ripping our arm off our practice bot to make a kicker...because it was sooooo cool to score that way. The students wanted to put in the time. The mentors did too. So we did.

I think that was the last season of "big changes" other than minibot deployer in 2011...again...233 found such a cool way to launch those suckers...

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by MikeL303

Why do mentors get burned out?

Mentoring a team during build season can be a full-time job. Add that on top of a "real" full-time job and something's going to have to give. Six weeks is about the limit for neglecting family and for postponing downtime.

I am convinced that a firm "stop build" date is a very good thing.

[JB987]

For me, any burnout is due primarily to the compression of work into a 6 week time frame. The time frame we are given results in us working 6/7 days a week, late into the night often and even with some rotation of mentors on various days of the week we still suffer some "burnout". Of course my team doesn't stop working at the end of 6 weeks as we continue to build, iterate, program and practice with our second robot...but we do so with a less intense work rate. My team is already working throughout the season and spreading out the work hours and days would, for me, be less stressful. And no, we wouldn't just fill in the available time (we already demonstrate the ability to say we aren't going to work on certain days during the 6 week period).

If the FTC open build model were adopted for FRC I can see teams saving money on a second robot, taking more days off so we actually get to spend a more days each week with our family throughout the season. The extended access to the competition robot could also make things easier on some of our sponsors who are sometimes asked to rush outside work for us as well to fit most of our work into the 6 week period.

[waialua359]

Team 359 over recent years have "Mentor Burnout" "Travel Burnout" "Lack of family time Burnout" and "Financial Burnout."
Winning the CCA and many Regional Championship Banners have helped ease the burnout pain.

But as Adam has stated here, our mentors arent getting any younger, and we are also faced with the transitioning of mentorship to former students.

Our program puts just as much time in VEX and it really adds to the burnout issues.

[Lil' Lavery]

The Chief Delphi bias strikes once again. Please keep in mind that CD is not representative of the FRC population as a whole, and most teams who post actively on CD are above average.

Most of the elite teams meet constantly, and well past the stop work date. They have aggressive schedules, practice robots, practice fields, and lofty goals.
Will eliminating the stop work date improve their result? Probably to a marginal degree.
Will eliminating the stop work date reduce their mentor stress? To an extent, especially on competition weeks.

Most of the FRC population does not meet constantly, and scales back their efforts significantly past the stop work date. Their schedules are still demanding, but less so than the FRC elite. They don't have practice robots, and have to do significant testing and driver training at their first (and frequently only) event.
Will eliminating the stop work date improve their result? In large part yes. Bottom teir teams will still struggle (it doesn't take six weeks to build a box on wheels with bumpers, more time is not going to fix the teams who cannot do that). Middle teir teams will likely show up much closer to ready, but many will still not have ever put their robot on a real field to get proper autonomous testing and driver training.
Will eliminating the stop work date reduce their mentor stress? Not likley. Even without meeting every day, these mentors are often pushed to (or well past) their limits. Extending that build period will not help matters, even if their robot does better.

Obviously these are generalizations, but it's how I feel these types of changes would impact generalized versions of teams. I'm in the same boat as Madison (including that competing early in the season is a disadvantage to many teams who have yet to pass the threshold of being competitive). 1712 meets 3 times a week, with some additional meetings late in the season. More time would help, but few of us have that time or energy to spare. We're all exhausted when the build season ends, as it is.

I don't know if a longer build would raise the "floor" per se, but it would likely help with raising the 25%-75% percentile of teams. However, you may well see the number of teams drop, as mentor burnout increases.

[Bongle]

Pretty burned-out mentor here. I had too much non-FIRST stuff going on this year, and found that robotics was a bit of a chore. I'm always nonplussed about build season, but this year felt really bad. Between work, a start-up, and a girlfriend, I was massively overstretched. Our main mentor is fortunate enough to be retired, but as a working stiff I'm finding less and less time for FIRST.

The 6-week season absolutely must be kept, and I'd be happy if they eliminated the withholding allowance too. Top-end teams will build practice bots, but top-end teams will always find a way to be better whether the season is long or not. I had to skip out on the mid-february-until-first-competition build season this year, and I felt awful about it. I shouldn't feel like I'm abandoning my team by not showing up after build season.

Here's the problem:
-Extending the build season would certainly raise the floor of performance, but it would also raise the ceiling. Teams that perform near the bottom now would perform near the bottom with an official 9-week build season. Their robot might be better at the game, but everyone else's robot would be better at it too. Human psychology and satisfaction isn't interested in absolute performance, it's interested in relative performance. And coming dead last feels just as bad whether your robot can score (9 weeks) or not (6 weeks).
-Put another way, the build season is a bit of an arms race: if everyone spends 3 more weeks, then that's 3 more weeks of neglected homework, children, and jobs for essentially zero gain. The extra 3 weeks will probably not gain you any ground on any other teams, because they'll also be working for an extra 3 weeks.
-Teams can't really say "well we're just going to work for 6 weeks", because that guarantees that they'll get beaten by the teams that are willing to sacrifice their non-FIRST lives more.
-If FIRST were to make the build season officially longer, they'd probably make the games proportionally more difficult, so you'd still have teams unable to perform any of the tasks. It's not like we'd have 9 weeks to achieve the same bar we have now: the bar would be higher.


Here's a proposal to enforce a short build season: have the drive station software stop working between the end of build season until thursday of the competitions that that team is registered for, along with the reinstatement of "raw materials only" being brought to competitions. Boom: no more practice robots, no more february->march build season, no more 4-months of daily meetings to be competitive.

[Clem1640]

If we kept the rule concerning ending work on a certain date (the old ship date; now a bag & tag date for most events), then 6 weeks is appropriate. If this were 7 or 8 weeks, we would continue to work as intensely, but for additional time. We build a nice, designed robot, but frankly, it is never really "done". ...On the other hand, 6 months would reduce the pressure...

Maintaining the current intensity for 1 or 2 more weeks would not be an improvement from a burn-out standpoint; just worse. It would also seem to necessitate a delay in the competition season, which is probably impractical, given that this runs to the end of April now.

On the other hand, if the robot remained accessible for modification throughout the competition season (no bag & tag), it might reduce burn out a little (although I have some reservations). Mostly, this would eliminate the need for competitive teams to build a second robot (which helps).

[Adam Freeman]

Originally Posted by MrJohnston

There is also a huge value in having to make a difficult deadline. The six week time period is very short and every team knows it. Teams then have to evaluate their ideas and determine which ones are the most important and attainable before the deadline. Moreover, it forces them to operate under stress - all the while trying to maintain gracious professionalism.

Frankly, learning the teamwork and leadership required to build a robot under those conditions is more valuable than the technical skills acquired.

I do like this aspect of the 6-week build. It's not easy to get a high quality machine built in 6-weeks. When it happens, it is very rewarding!

With the currently imposed 6-week deadline, we WANT to get the robot completed in this time frame. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't.

I'm sure it helps to keep the students motivated as well.

[Hjelstrom]

I vote to keep the 6 week deadline. I would even vote to eliminate the withholding allowance. The arms race will get worse as teams start copying the good designs they see in earlier competitions (take a look at VEX). It will turn into a never-ending brutal build season if you want to try to compete with the best.
(just my opinion)

[Tom Line]

I would hate anything longer than the 6 weeks of open bag.

Yes, the season continues after you bag, but for us it's a much slower pace. We're usually refining code on the robot, fixing any major issues, then planning for the bag window. For us that means we go from a 7 day a week before bag to a 2-3 day per week after bag.

Having the robot out-of-bag would mean that the 7 day grind would keep going, because 'large scale' improvements like adding a climber would still be on the table.

I'd vote to keep the current system just for my sanity.

Also, as a parent with kids, there's simply no way I could devote more time than I already do. I would have to take a long hard look at whether or not I would continue to mentor if a longer build season was implemented.