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#1
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
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I'm not sure if I am understanding you but 10 months is a long time. I am a manufacturing engineer, and the issue is with supply is sudden spike is demand. In the past, I had my line shut down to devout resources to another line because a customer bought 2 1/2 months worth of product (calculated by the pervious year demand divided by 12). We don't carry that much inventory hence the issue. Determining that buffer of inventory can be difficult. I have seen months worth of inventory thrown away because the product was obsoleted and its a huge waste. From a cost point of view, no one wants to miss opportunities of sales because a lack of supply and no one wants to be the sucker holding a huge chunk of product they can't sale. In any of these cases, we would piss off our customers if we said," oh our demand was suddenly high and our supply is limited, so we are going to charge you more." So the supply and demand costs won't change. The point is FIRST puts a huge spike in demand and some suppliers will guess wrong about what to stock up. In 2012 is was 6" pneumatic wheels. This year, hex bearings. Even right now, I am investigating products I want to buy now that I think the team will use next year. Hence in another thread I asked about other SMC valves. I think we will be buying talons and victors for next year in june. We already have a stockpile on bearings, which will soon grow bigger. This is all to avoid falling victim to a part shortage and to gain a competitive edge by having material on hand to start building right away. |
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#2
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
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I don't know if that's the case or not. If there are no competitors, then you're likely in the realm of market failure (in this case, monopoly) where traditional economic reasoning doesn't quite hold. Alternatively, in a competitive market, consider the possibility that another vendor will realize that you're out of stock and bid higher when approached by your customer (who has no pre-existing relationship that would tend to influence the price). Also, I would take issue with treating a lot of the FIRST-specific market as fully competitive. I'm of the opinion that there are both good and bad reasons why total competitiveness isn't always desired by FIRST, the vendors and the teams. |
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#3
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
My responses to some of the arguments favoring bag and tag deadlines:
If we eliminate bag and tag, some teams will work the same insane schedule for 3-4 months instead of just for 6 weeks, and other teams will be forced to follow suit in order to stay competitive. Some teams already put in insane hours between bag and season's end. If your team doesn't match that number of hours, you've already proven that this argument is false. Work expands to fill the available time. The available time is already 3-4 months long. We can always work on 30 lbs of fabricated items, and that is typically enough weight to create multiple complete robot subsystems. That time is available to all teams, whether they currently take advantage of it or not. To be sure, some teams have the capability to utilize that time more effectively than others, particularly if they have the budget to build an extra copy of a subsystem or of the entire robot. So the question is whether to make that additional time readily available to more teams. Why would anybody favor a rule that places practical limits on low resource teams, but not high resource teams? The answers I'm seeing boil down to the next statement... We would not be able to prevent ourselves from working lots of extra hours and burning out. That is not a good reason to place limits on other teams. Your team needs to sit down and figure out a reasonable schedule and stick to it. That brings me to the concept of the "build sprint." Build Sprint Why does FRC have to be a sprint? Why can't it be something that we do at a slightly slower pace over a longer time period? It's an embedded tradition to have a "build sprint", but why does it have to be that way? Are you going to argue that all projects that one would work on in industry are sprints? They're not. The sprint concept is one of the reasons people are afraid of an open build season. Some people can't imagine scheduling an FRC build season in any way other than letting it fill all available time slots for the entire period during which we're allowed to work. If the season is short enough, we can get away with that. There's a limit to how long a team can operate under a 100% pedal to the metal schedule in which we work during all available time. Anybody could do it for a week, right? Two and three weeks starts to get pretty tiring, and it gets worse from there. How long is too long before we start screwing up our jobs and families and health? I'd argue that 6 weeks is already past that limit for many of us, especially those who are saying that they're very near the point of burnout and potentially needing to walk away from FRC. You know what that means? It means taking a hard look at the schedule and consider rolling it back a bit. Don't meet for 100% of your maximum possible time during that 6 week period if it's going to screw up your life. Bite off the amount that you can reasonably sustain. If we had a 3-4 month build season, I think it would be easier to recognize that we can't simply meet during every possible time slot. It would force us to answer the question of "how much of my life does it make sense to dedicate to this team?" In a 6 week season, it's easier to cheat your way out of that question by simply assuming that you have to work during all possible times since the timeline is so severely limited. Get rid of the 30 lb allowance so the build season really is only 6 weeks long. True, this would make it more difficult to do robot work after bag day than it currently is. Right now it's pretty attainable for a lot of teams to improve the robot after bag day. With this limitation it would be harder. But we'd have less competitive, less inspiring robots. I've said this before - the extra time it takes to get a machine to actually work is really valuable. Quitting at the point when it almost works really sucks a lot of the power out of this endeavor. How many FRC robots have you seen that almost work? I've seen a lot. Make no mistake - there is essentially nothing we can do to take away the extra time after bag day from the best teams. Even if we went to zero fabricated parts allowance, good teams would still be able to complete a great deal of useful work between bag day and their competitions (drive a practice bot, autonomous testing, sensors work, code work, design mechanisms that can be fabricated at the event, etc). That's why the six week build season is fiction. Keep the bag deadline, but add limited robot access periods after bag day. This creates a compromise that allows mentors to have a break. I could live with this, and it would be an improvement over the current rules. That said, why does this break have to be enforced through the FRC rules? Would you advocate forcing teams to take at least 1 or 2 days off per week for the purpose of preventing burnout? If not, how is that different than forcing us to stop working after 6 weeks? In many ways, FIRST and the community have embraced the concept that different teams run themselves in their own ways according to what works best for them. Why not extend this to the schedule? Some teams might be better off spreading it out over a longer period, working less severe hours in a given week. Some teams might be better off loading it more heavily in February and March. And so on. I see nothing wrong with that sort of flexibility. Lack of ability to schedule realistically on the part of some teams is not a good reason to limit flexibility for other teams. |
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#4
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
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#5
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
Someone attempting to dismantle a bomb isn't going to take a one minute break just because the timer on the bomb randomly increased by one minute. They would take that additional time to work on dismantling the bomb. Same with FIRST robotics - if you give all teams additional time, the students and mentorship are going to do everything in their power to utilize that extra time by default rather than spending the extra time to relax their schedule.
In a perfect FIRST world, every FIRST team would be given a total of 240 work hours over the course of 45.5 days to build a robot. The robot must be bagged either by a) the end of the 240 hours or b) the end of the 45.5 days - whichever comes first. Teams could be able to utilize the 240 hours how they wish to ensure the students and mentors can work within their own time constraints and also work the same number of hours as every other team. (If you are wondering, I got 240 hours by suggesting that every team works 5 hours every weekday and 10 hours every saturday during the traditional 6 week build season + 10 hours to round it to a slick number.) But obviously we are not in a perfect world and cheating (either purposeful or accidental) is an obvious problem. Additionally, would you consider a single student/mentor designing a robot part at home in CAD be "part of your hours"...lots of issues to the hourly limit. However that would be the Perfect System if the world worked correctly. Last edited by Tetraman : 06-05-2013 at 19:53. Reason: Fixing up the wordage |
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#6
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
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#7
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
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And how can an extra saturday inspire a student? Mentorship inspires a student and as this thread has proven there is a big issue with mentor burnout because there is too big of an attendance requirement. I stated that "If you give all teams additional time, the students and mentorship are going to do everything in their power to utilize that extra time by default rather than spending the extra time to relax their schedule." I'm suggesting that giving additional time to teams isn't going to fix the 'burnout' problem because those additional days and times will be used the same way their current days and times are. None of the teams are going to say "Today, we take this specific friday off - the team will not meet on friday during week 5 out of 7." That's scary. Additional time isn't going to make students 'stronger' if the mentors get 'weaker'. Actually that would be fine by me. The goal in my scenario is to find what kinds of team advantages would be fair and I think that team size is a fair advantage. If you can recruit them, maintain them, and provide for them, why wouldn't team size be an allowed advantage? I don't think having 200 active students and 40 active mentors/coaches/parents is a good team size at all, but if a team can utilize it then have at it. Team Size works itself out based on what teams can manage for themselves and its not that team size equates to more victories. Last edited by Tetraman : 08-05-2013 at 07:29. |
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#8
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
Excellent discussion here. I tend to side with the folks who believe that the work will expand to fill the available space. My son was a senior on the team, and I wanted very much for our team to make our first trip to CMP. Some might say (have said) I was obsessive. We finished the shooter just prior to our Week 1 competition, bringing in 28 pounds withholding, and tweaked the shooter on the practice bot between week 1 and 3. Well, it worked, resulting in a Week 3 win at Peachtree (Thanks 4026, 4080), but feeding issues remained. So, then we embarked on a completely new shooter for CMP. That meant a solid 4 months of FRC. Had a great time at CMP, and would love to go back. Question is, can my home life handle this level of commitment?
If the withholding allowance were held to a more modest 10 pounds, perhaps it would have saved us from ourselves (or the team from ME). We could still "tweak" some subsystems (like feeding), but the stretch goal of an entire new shooter would be out of reach. BTW, the latest shooter revision was easier to feed, but less consistent shooting, so maybe we learned a lesson there? On a slightly unrelated note, why does Bag Day have to be a Tuesday? If it's truly a six week build, make it on a Saturday. If not, just make it a full 7 week build and bag on a Saturday night. The students won't have school the next day, and the Mentors won't be zombies at their jobs (or have to burn vacation) the next day. |
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#9
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
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Last edited by Taylor : 08-05-2013 at 08:50. Reason: wrong holiday |
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#10
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
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#11
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
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Now expand that to an official, with-robot, 4 months. If they aren't building, they'll be doing drive practice. Quote:
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Oh, right: FIRST also mimics a real-world experience. Let's go with I haven't had a build sprint per se at work yet, but other groups have been doing them--it's just a matter of who it is this time. Quote:
I also don't agree on the "less inspiring" part. Sometimes, the best inspiration comes when you've duct-taped parts that weren't necessarily meant to work together into something that works. Apollo 13's filters, for example. "We need to fit this into this, and this is what we have to do it with." Some pre-planning required for at-competition assembly of any improvements, of course--but any team that is able to stick to a reasonable schedule (and most of the ones that don't) and remain competitive should be able to do that no problem. Quote:
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#12
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
The mythical 6-week stop build day isn't really a deadline at all... it's merely a disturbance. The deadline is when your qualification matches begin.
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#13
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
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If, OTOH, you want to go with the example I was talking about, the "disturbance" is only a few billion dollars and a couple years of several thousand people's lives wasted. Catch my drift? |
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#14
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
I’ve been reflecting on the many posts which infer that we must choose between FIRST FRC excellence and having a life. I think that can be said about any endeavor. Think about it, those at the “top” of any field or profession are highly committed and focused. It may appear to some of us that they don’t have a life or that perhaps their priorities are misplaced or they have extraordinary capacity.
I think it is a reasonable inference to say that those of us posting on this thread are striving to be excellent. I do not want to sacrifice quality and competitiveness in my own program and I certainly do not want FIRST to implement rules which inhibit my ability or anybody else’s ability to be as great as they want to be. I will respect another person’s choices when it comes to their level of commitment to their program and I neither need nor want FIRST or anybody else (outside of my wife) dictating my level of commitment to our program. I want to see FIRST FRC continuing to grow in both number of teams participating and the quality and competitiveness of their robots. I believe that the mythical 6 week build season is as much a deterrent to both of those goals as anything else. More rules which are more constraining are certainly not going to help, in my opinion, ease the burden of mentors or students. More things like Ri3D would go a long way toward accomplishing the goal of increasing competitiveness. Those things may also help ease the burden of many mentors, too. I'll say it one more time, the only stop build date should be the ship date to Championships. |
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#15
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of teams out there that are extremely inspiring without putting their mentors through extreme burnout or forcing their students to give up other activities, etc. I believe that it is in the interests of FIRST to ensure that that remains the case. If that entails placing or keeping limits on those teams that do not limit themselves as much, that may be unfortunate for them but I think that at some point you have to look at everyone's interests. The NCAA has quite comprehensive limits on when and how teams can practice, and their goals are pretty similar...
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