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.

[Irwin772]

I disagree with eliminating the six week build season, the only thing I could see happening is that addition of an additional week. The whole idea of having six weeks is to prepare the students for life and real world applications, where there are strict deadlines that must be met.

I also suffer from burnout towards the end of the season both as a student and a mentor this past year. I can't even count the amount of hours I've spent on robotics in high school and university but getting rid of the time limit to build the robot removes on of the learning points that FIRST created. The students need to learn to meet deadlines, even in high school.

To prove that it should not be problem to build the robot and test before the end of the six weeks take into account that us Canadian teams have to deal with exams during week 3 or 4 depending on the year, which makes all of us lose at least 4 days of build season. Even with this barrier Canada has been able to produce 2 world champions and some of the biggest powerhouse teams in FIRST.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Irwin772

Even with this barrier Canada has been able to produce 2 world champions and some of the biggest powerhouse teams in FIRST.

Do you think they stopped working after 6 weeks?

[JB987]

Originally Posted by 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.

+1!

[Tetraman]

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.

[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by Tetraman

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.

If that were true every single team would meet 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Here's the thing they don't. Teams have been regulating themselves for years. I know of very few teams that meet 7 days a week and even fewer that work in shifts to maximize every second. Giving more time won't make teams work that much more. Most teams aren't working to the max yet, most people still understand that it's just a game. Giving more team would allow for more reasonable schedules a few more Saturday build/practice sessions that will help inspire students.

Originally Posted by Tetraman

In a perfect FIRST world, every FIRST team would be given a total of 240 work hours over the course of 2 months to build a robot. The robot must be bagged either by a) the end of the 240 hours or b) the end of the 2 months - 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.)

How would you account for teams with more people. It's never going to be fair and we shouldn't try to make it fair.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by 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.

I disagree. The key words that you appear to have overlooked are "to stay competitive". If a team does not match that number of hours, and is still competitive, then yes, that is false. But if the team in question is NOT competitive, then I would consider it at best a "no-contributor" to the argument--that is, it's not doing anything to show whether it is true or 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.

And darned if teams don't take advantage of it to the max, at least the ones that want to stay competitive do. Again, it's those words: To Stay Competitive. Low-resource, high-resource, doesn't matter--teams with any amount of resources that want to stay competitive ARE using EVERY POSSIBLE DAY they can work. Why? Because they know that if they don't, someone else will, and they'll lose.

Now expand that to an official, with-robot, 4 months. If they aren't building, they'll be doing drive practice.

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."

Ahem... I would like to point out that most teams do figure out a reasonable schedule. Then at about Week 4, somebody looks at the calendar, realizes that they're behind even where they wanted to be, which is probably behind period, and goes pedal to the metal. (I know you were competitive this year--but did you stick to a reasonable schedule?)

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. [...]

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.

Nice theory. For some folks, I think the answer would end up being "Oh, I don't have anything important from X to Y dates, so I can show up all those sessions", "hey, I have something on Z, but other than that I'm free", and I think it would probably end up being a meeting during--maybe not every, but almost every time slot. However, I think what would also happen is that there might be some "rolling" or "staggered" days, such that crew A is in on certain days, while crew B is in on other days, or "Oh, yeah, we're not doing much on X day, so go ahead and take the day off".

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.

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.

I don't think anybody's actually proposed this. I think it's been proposed to trim it down, but not remove it entirely.

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.

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?

I don't think we're aiming to force teams to take days off. I think it's more about allowing them to use their competition robot for development--within reasonable limitations, such as a certain amount of time per week--so that they don't have to build a practice robot, which, at least in theory, will allow them to use less time and still remain competitive. Of course, there's no restriction on how you use time outside of any such open bag windows.

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.

FIRST is a mirror of real life. If June 7, 2050 is the best day for a Mars launch, and NASA is sending something there, they want the hardware on the rocket, upright, and ready to launch on or before June 7, 2050. Not a day later. Preferably a day or 30 earlier. If you are building the payload for that rocket, there are going to be deadlines--you really don't want to miss those. There is going to be a fixed amount of time--it might not be 6 weeks, but there are a limited number of man-hours that can be put into the project between the contract award date and the launch date. And you better make that deadline.

[Brian Selle]

Originally Posted by EricH

And you better make that deadline.

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.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by btslaser

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.

If you want to put it that way, the deadline is when your last match of the season, whether at an on-season or an offseason competition, begins.

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?

[dcarr]

Originally Posted by Irwin772

To prove that it should not be problem to build the robot and test before the end of the six weeks take into account that us Canadian teams have to deal with exams during week 3 or 4 depending on the year, which makes all of us lose at least 4 days of build season. Even with this barrier Canada has been able to produce 2 world champions and some of the biggest powerhouse teams in FIRST.

FYI - Canadians aren't the only ones having to deal with exams during the build season. Our school, and perhaps many others, have finals in week 2 which is pretty damaging to the schedule, basically knocks out a full week for many of the students.

[sanddrag]

I dislike the fact that because there are really no limits on working after stop build day, we invest thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to build an identical practice robot, when we could much more easily (but not currently 'legally') have only one robot and no bag. We are spending all this time and money to because we are required to put a few mils of plastic between ourselves and something we can just make two of and continue development on. In that sense, the bagging is absurd. But, it does have it's benefits, as indicated by numerous others previously.

Anyhow, consider this mentor burnt to a crisp. FRC is becoming a competition of which team has more experienced people who can sideline the greatest percentages of their lives for the greatest amount of time. It's a battle of who can sacrifice the most, and it's not healthy. It's tough to keep up.

I wouldn't mind seeing something imposed that said "FRC teams may only meet a maximum of 6 days per week, and may elect which day per week they choose as their non-work day. On the non-work day, team members may not design, fabricate, assemble, procure, or program any piece of the robot, or take part in any activities directly related to FIRST Robotics." Of course it's not enforceable, and teams would find a way to bend the rule, but it would be nice to go home for even just one day per week. Come to think of it, this isn't really any less enforceable than bagging, which is honor system anyhow. FIRST HQ, I haven't wished much of you, but for 2014, my wish is to make us go home once in a while. Thoughts?

[dcarr]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

I dislike the fact that because there are really no limits on working after stop build day, we invest thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to build an identical practice robot, when we could much more easily (but not currently 'legally') have only one robot and no bag. We are spending all this time and money to because we are required to put a few mils of plastic between ourselves and something we can just make two of and continue development on.

[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

I wouldn't mind seeing something imposed that said "FRC teams may only meet a maximum of 6 days per week, and may elect which day per week they choose as their non-work day. On the non-work day, team members may not design, fabricate, assemble, procure, or program any piece of the robot, or take part in any activities directly related to FIRST Robotics." Of course it's not enforceable, and teams would find a way to bend the rule, but it would be nice to go home for even just one day per week. Come to think of it, this isn't really any less enforceable than bagging, which is honor system anyhow. FIRST HQ, I haven't wished much of you, but for 2014, my wish is to make us go home once in a while. Thoughts?

I agree with most of your post until this part. Coming from a team with only one mentor (myself) meeting more is one of the ways we stay competitive. None of my students are at every meeting. They all know they can take breaks but if FRC instituted that rule it would be difficult for us to remain competitive with teams that have 10 mentors. We don't always build 7 days a week, we have outreach stuff during build season that we do as well. Either way FRC shouldn't regulate meeting hours just like they don't regulate mentor or student involvement in the build process. The more FRC gets out of the way and let teams build the program that is right for the them the better.

[Mark Sheridan]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

Anyhow, consider this mentor burnt to a crisp. FRC is becoming a competition of which team has more experienced people who can sideline the greatest percentages of their lives for the greatest amount of time. It's a battle of who can sacrifice the most, and it's not healthy. It's tough to keep up.

Also to add to this point there is only so much you can give up before you got to throw in the towel. I found myself extremely busy at work, long hours in december and January. I found myself burnt out before the season began. So I had to greatly scale back my contributions. Next year, I am thinking I am going to limit myself to just transmissions, strategy and a little bit of pneumatics. I think its the only way to keep sane.

This year to avoid burning out our lead CAD mentor, we were able to raise from one active CAD project to running 3 projects in parallel this year. I hope we can make it 5 next year. We have a lot students getting good at CAD, they just need to learn some more tolerancing and design for manufacturing. With all these different projects, we have to be very carful to not to encroach another space on the robot and to stay within our weight limits.

I hope we can keep on distributing our work to get as many students involved.

[Rich Kressly]

Depends on the prevailing philosophy and corresponding goals.

IMHO:

If you want the best robots and teams to get better on the field and are cool with asking those teams that want to be on-field competitive to start giving up other/more activities in their lives (mentors and students alike), then lengthen build, open up withholding allowance, etc.

If you want as many teams to participate in FRC as possible, keep the six weeks, get rid of the withholding allowance, and after stop build there is no robot work except at events.

I think we all agree mentor burnout is real. Potential mentor fear (no way I'm joining that FRC team, do you know their commitment?) is also an issue.

Again, it all depends upon what you want, but after many years mentoring/coaching in many programs (robots and otherwise) it would seem to me you can't have it both ways, though.

-Rich