The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[Nemo]

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.