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Unread 05-05-2013, 20:51
Ian Curtis Ian Curtis is offline
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

There are a lot of people that seem to be saying they are flirting with burnout even with a 6.5 week build season. I don't think we should consider this healthy!

If FIRST is coming close to burning out the core mentors that are involved enough to post on CD, we are definitely also coming close to burning out the mentors that are not posting on CD. Even if you don't like the idea of the unlimited build season, I think it is pretty clear we have to try something else.

For me, having one or two nights a week where I can just go home after work is awesome. After 10 years of robots, I know work expands to fill the available time, and as deadlines close in work just seems to get done. I know for 1778, I plan to meet much less next season than we did this year, and fully expect to build a much more competitive robot. (Conveniently we set the bar fairly low )

There seem to be a lot of people in this thread that are against the unlimited build season because they are worried about the top tier running away with the medals. As Adam said, I don't think that is likely. The 67s of the world are really far down the learning curve. IMO, a switch to the unlimited build season will result in less work to a top tier team, since you don't have to apply all your fixes to the practice robot and then your real robot. If you cannot put in the time to be top tier now, isn't reducing that number of hours a good thing for all of us? Those that observe a 6.5 week build season instead of the 16 week build season are already limiting themselves from the allowable build time, so I don't see why switching to the unlimited build makes you any less able to limit yourself.

The one strong argument I do see for Stop Build Day is that it means that everyone has a good night's sleep prior to the event, and no one is staying up late the night before finishing their machine and showing up grumpy. I did this too many times in FLL.

When I started reading this thread, I was very firmly in the "Stop Build Day" camp. But the more I think about it, the more I think we do it out of tradition instead of value added.
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Unread 05-05-2013, 21:13
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

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Originally Posted by Ian Curtis View Post
If FIRST is coming close to burning out the core mentors that are involved enough to post on CD, we are definitely also coming close to burning out the mentors that are not posting on CD..
I'm not sure this is true. The people that post on CD are the people that care enough to put in the kind of time it takes to burn out. So many of the teams I know that just sort of plod along every year don't get burned out. They have much more reasonable schedules, 2-3 nights a week and a day on the weekends. They don't meet consistently over the summer and some don't meet at all in the fall. However I agree that giving them more time will help.
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Unread 06-05-2013, 09:37
DjScribbles DjScribbles is offline
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

Personally, I find the competition season as stressful, if not more stressful than build season.

Build season is fun, things are constantly improving; sure there is some conflict and lost sleep, but in general you can get things done efficiently.

Once build season comes to a close though, things stop and the combination of anxiousness and lack of opportunity to improve get rather stressful. I struggled from day 2 of our second event, all the way through MSC and CMP trying to test an autonomous routine that would have literally taken me two hours tops in our build area; but instead I had to fight to test something during our few opportunities on crowded practice fields (which do not provide enough room to actually test any creative autonomous routines such as center-line or 9-disk) and during our few practice matches.

The inability to improve, fix problems, and do basic maintenance is absolutely harrowing as well. At our second event, we had a big issue with shooter accuracy, before bagging we found and fixed an issue with the sensor, but it didn't get tested until 3 long weeks later at MSC. We have a shooter wheel that is almost bare, but it's difficult to make a case for changing it when you have a match in an hour and nobody thinks another wheel could work, and the one you have does still work.

Ultimately, I think the bag date may make the days between events more relaxed, but it greatly magnifies the stress at the event for everyone, and requires teams to take a ton of risk to try to improve; and when those risks don't pan out, it can have a huge impact on a student.

I would absolutely love to go to an event where our TODO list was:
Get Inspected
Double check that everything works well on the field
Compete

If that was every team's situation... imagine how easy it would be to get on the practice field when problems arise, how much more help you could provide to teams that are struggling, etc.
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