The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[LMD3130]

I'm our team captain, but in this topic I do not represent the opinion of our team, or that of our mentor. Although being restricted to 6 weeks can be very stressful for all people involved, it is part of what makes this competition "The hardest fun you'll ever have". Our team started four years ago, and has been desperate to catch up to the elite teams of our state, for those 6 weeks our students come in every day after school from 3:20pm to around 9:45pm or 10:00pm, we also come in on both Saturdays and Sundays at around 11:00am and stay till 10:00pm (often 11:00 in the last week), and finally this work may finally be paying off in putting us up in the elite. I understand that this is a lot to ask of our mentor, and he does put up with it to much, but we also have about five or so dedicated parents that often come in after they are done at work and help out, and although they aren't as technically skilled as our mentor, they are very helpful and help alleviate the pressure put on him. After the 6 week season ends we take a short break to recuperate, and then ease back into our work, this year I missed a total of about 4.5 days (work and illness) and although at the time I may have felt burnout, I knew that this was a necessary evil to accomplishing a working robot in 6 weeks, I say that because I believe in this case my mentor has the same opinion. As a final note I believe that "removing" the 6 week limit is detrimental and would steer new people away when they see the commitment required, it also takes half the fun out of the competition. 6 weeks is the way to go!

[Holtzman]

In my professional life, I work for a company that builds custom automated systems for the food industry. When the jobs get handed off to our engineering department we’ve got our budget, the design constraints, and a ship date. The design constraints can, and do often change along the way, but rarely does the ship date get pushed back. Sound familiar?

When we quote a new system to a customer, the customers are looking at how much we’re going to charge them, the quality of our work, and how quickly we can deliver the equipment. There are often many cases where we are not the cheapest quote, but since we can deliver a quality product faster, we win the contract.

Once our ship date comes around, if we’re not ready, we face financial penalties, and potential loss of future contracts. If something breaks or doesn’t work 100% on startup, we often fabricate warrantee replacement or upgrade parts (at our cost), and travel to the end users facility to install and troubleshoot the new components. Sound familiar?

I look at our 6 week build season as exactly the same situation. It’s not just who can build the best robot, but who can build the best robot in 6 weeks. I have a real appreciation for the teams that can come out in week 1 or 2 guns blazing, and set the bar for the rest of the season. The 6 week season is a great analogy for real world design projects, and I feel it is a must for FIRST. The withholding allowance is also very realistic, although I’d personally like to see it reduced to about 10 lbs or so, and exclude spare parts from it. Teams could still repair mechanisms that become damaged, but not replace or add entire mechanisms, minibot launchers, ball magnets, Frisbee pickups, etc.

In regards to mentor burnout, we are a very competitive team and we take our on field performance very seriously. If FIRST were to open the season wide open, we would work every bit as hard as we do during the current build season, right up until the championship. Any team who wanted to be a contender would be forced to do the same.

We would approach the season in one of two ways. Don’t compete at any early season events in order to maximize our testing and debugging time. Or build two completely different robots, one that was good enough to win an early regional and qualify, and another potentially completely different one designed and built for the championship. The second one would probably not be started until after week 1 of regionals, and would never compete before the championship.

I would be forced to seriously reconsider my involvement in FIRST as a result of the toll it would take on my health, and personal/professional lives. This is largely because of my competitive personality, and complete inability to lead a balanced lifestyle. My take on the whole idea, the FIRST season is great the way it is. Don’t change a thing.

If you want to see the most competitive and capable robots battling it out at the championship, open it up more, but be prepared to see some negative side effects as a result. If you want less mentor burnout, keep it at 6 weeks or less, get rid of the withholding allowance, and don’t allow any fabrication or software development after bag day, but don’t be surprised when we have lots of brave little toasters taking the field.

[Michael Corsetto]

Originally Posted by Holtzman

We would approach the season in one of two ways. Don’t compete at any early season events in order to maximize our testing and debugging time. Or build two completely different robots, one that was good enough to win an early regional and qualify, and another potentially completely different one designed and built for the championship. The second one would probably not be started until after week 1 of regionals, and would never compete before the championship.

Really interesting point. Now I have more things to think about...

I still believe as it currently is set up, "build season" is from Kickoff to CMP. I agree with Tyler's closing thoughts on what next year could look like...

Originally Posted by Holtzman

If you want to see the most competitive and capable robots battling it out at the championship, open it up more, but be prepared to see some negative side effects as a result. If you want less mentor burnout, keep it at 6 weeks or less, get rid of the withholding allowance, and don’t allow any fabrication or software development after bag day, but don’t be surprised when we have lots of brave little toasters taking the field.

If this is the choice put in front of FIRST, what would they choose? I think we'll see a change next year, I just don't know in what direction.

-Mike

[JB987]

"It's silly to think we would pace ourselves, because I know there are teams that aren't. This is a competition. If you're not in it to give the absolute best effort you can, why even bother? If the rules let you work 7 days a week for 10 weeks, I'll be working 7 days a week for 10 weeks, and it will be everything else that suffers as a result, not the FRC team. "

So, because someone is unable/unwilling to set a work schedule that decreases their chance of burnout, we should limit every other team's options? As you may have surmised, my team is in it to give the best effort that we can (which is why we adopted a reduced work schedule to maintain our sanity and productivity) and we don't work 7 days a week for 6.5 weeks anymore (see my earlier post)...and we seem to be able to maintain a high degree of competitiveness. It's not the total number of hours worked that determines a program's success, it is the quality of the time spent. For me, working no more (and maybe even less) hours but spreading the hours/days out more would serve to reduce stress and allow for a better balance of personal-competitive life.

[Jared Russell]

This has become one of my favorite CD threads of all time.

It is not often that you get to gain so much insight into the thought processes of others, the inner workings of so many types of teams, and so many rational and well-stated arguments on all sides of the issue. Although I continue to come down on the side of unlimited machine access, I do sympathize with the concerns many have (Parkinson's law and burnout, keeping up with the Joneses, cloning of effective designs, the life lessons of a hard deadline).

[Siri]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

Here's another element. Some teams are fortunate to have their student membership comprised primarily of students who do FIRST Robotics as their only extracurricular activity outside of class. Our students are not this way, and it often is a problem. Many different commitments are competing for their time. They are playing sports, running track, racing mountain bikes, debating in mock trials, playing musical instruments, completing senior projects, writing newspapers, publishing yearbooks, and taking as many as 5 AP classes.

The issue is simple. When the build season is extended, those of us who do more than just FIRST robotics cannot compete with those who have nothing else going on. We all can sideline our normal responsibilities for a few weeks and play catchup later, but there's no way we can sustain that for months.

This argument plays exactly both ways. Our team is filled with students--and mentors--like this. And I've noticed a trend: particularly in students, but also some in mentors, the ones that don't want a longer build tend to have activities that would conflict more if so, usually because there's no/less overlap currently. (The trend seems to somewhat hold in this thread, though not entirely.) Most everyone else views a longer season as the ability show up less often, do more other activities, and still actively participate in FIRST. Why? Because we set that schedule, and that's what we want.

FIRST is about nurturing students to become these amazing leaders: how does making them put their lives on hold--their Boy Scout work, their FBLA, their music, etc--for 2 months of the school year help that? In reality, many of our kids don't do this, and it mitigates what they get out of FIRST. It drives many, many, many students away. I've lost count of the number of students who come in excited, and then dart to VEX when they find out how time-concentrated FRC is. Why? Because they have things to do 2-4 nights a week. Because they have lives, homework, work...just like the mentors we lose do. This ends up burdening the students and mentors who stay even more, which is what brings us close to burn out.

For 7 years, I've watched great students and adults walk out the door at the explanation "6 weeks". And not that I don't like VEX, but I want those people! Our only electrical mentor (too many have been scared off) is in a similar boat--not available for FRC as much as he'd like. Every year we have electrical problems, and we always struggle to mentor students interested in the field the way they'd like. We've lost a lot of them.

This year, we got a great mechanical engineer--awesome guy, great with the kids, did our first FEA analysis ever--but he's just not available enough to stay with a 6 week sprint. We haven't been able to engage him because he always feels behind when he comes. I end up doing basically everything he could be doing--that he wants to do--instead of concentrating on how to mentor my strategy team. Now both of my fields aren't up to snuff, and it's cost us a lot of inspirational opportunities. Not competitive opportunities. (Very different, and we basically got the competitive opportunity this year.) Inspirational: I know my students aren't growing the way they could be with more downtime, more mentorship, more one-on-one availability, more money left for other activities. I know I've lost a lot of students because of it.

As a non-school team, many of our mentors and families have rather long commutes: one our key mentor + student families drives an hour each way, every day in build. Their story is far from unique--I drive 3 hours each way over the weekend and back & forth on Wednesdays for build seasons I spend on campus. Wouldn't I love to just come down weekends? Not building a practice bot would have freed up at 3 weeks throughout this full season.

In short, a more open build season would allow us to set our schedule based on our team's needs. I am confident that we can enforce with discipline (though Gary may want to give back his key) and actually save ourselves the practice bot time. Because we already do set our schedule, we already send people home, and we understand the benefits:
- Recruit more students who shy from the intense time commitment
- Retain and positively impact students who want to do other activities in build
- Recruit, retain and fully utilize mentors who cannot commit to 4-7 days/week.
- Cut down on commutes and concentrated commitment for just about everyone
- Save loads and loads of money on the practice bot, expedited shipping, and just-in-case-buying that can be put towards more inspirational efforts
- Teach our kids (and mentors) further discipline! How to stay on schedule and not kill yourself with FIRST.
- More time to practice and help other teams, both during the season (collaborative weekends) and at events when we're not scrambling to update the competition bot.
- More opportunity to help other teams at on-season scrimmages, and all in all just "raise the floor" of FIRST.


EDIT: All that said...yeah, basically what Jared said.

[Hjelstrom]

Originally Posted by Michael Corsetto

Really interesting point. Now I have more things to think about...

I still believe as it currently is set up, "build season" is from Kickoff to CMP. I agree with Tyler's closing thoughts on what next year could look like...



If this is the choice put in front of FIRST, what would they choose? I think we'll see a change next year, I just don't know in what direction.

-Mike

I think they'll pick something in-between. Keep the 6 weeks but allow an un-bag day and some reasonable withholding allowance so people can do minor improvemnents/repairs, practice and programming. Bots get a little better but we don't open pandoras box of cloning and the robot design meta-game where you have to build a second completely new robot in order to compete at worlds.

I *like* that teams 1986, 1114, 254 benefited by coming up with such incredible "do-almost-everything" designs. With the limited build, they are able to feel confident to freely share what they came up with. When you go to a team's pit, most teams are happy to show you any detail of their robot. If we make the build season wide open, teams will all just take the best ideas and bring completely new robots to worlds.

No-one who wants to have a chance in the competition will be working "less" if we have a wide open build season. We will all be designing our "worlds" robot and building it in the final weeks. Tyler described it very well in my opinion.

[thefro526]

I've been thinking a lot about this thread lately, and figured I'd post up some of my more recent thoughts/experiences.

Since 2011, my employer has been nice enough to sponsor whatever robotics team I've been affiliated with. The exact details vary a bit from season to season, but one thing that has always remained the same was a sort of 'unlimited' access to our sister companies resources as a machine shop. In 2011, we (at the time, we = 816) used them for a few small parts during the early build season and then not again until maybe week 3 or so of competition season, then in 2012 we outsourced a large portion of our robot to them and in 2013 after making the transition to 341, we had them run a lot of the sheet parts that you see on our robot this year - along with some of the 1/4" Plate Work.

In all three of those years, I was put in a very interesting position with my employer and my co-workers. To someone who didn't know the exact circumstances of the sponsorship agreement, it would appear as if I was shirking my responsibilies at work to play robots - when in reality robotics had become part of what I was 'supposed' to be working on while at work. (Protecting an investment sort of thing.)

Things get deeper from there, but to spare you much of the details here's the short and sweet... In both 2012 and 2013 there were parts orders that were sent to the machine shop through me that needed to be done on a schedule that would allow enough time for us to get the subsystems they were intended for done in time to ship the robot. This meant that the machine shop had to turn them around quicker than they usually would for nearly any customer and of course, if one thing needs to be done sooner than something else, that other thing is going to slip by the amount of time that the first takes.

In my case, the robot parts 'bumped' parts for a project that I am responsible for during my day job and things got really, really ugly for a bit. Much of what followed was the result of poor understanding at different levels and my failure to communicate exactly what was going on to my superiors and has since been resolved, but I can honestly say that weeks 5 and 6 of build season in both 2012 and 2013 have been two of the most stressful periods of my 'adult' life.

I guess the TLDR here is that the 6 week build season can really strain relationships between teams and sponsors - especially when employees of a sponsor are members/mentors/associates of the team.** Reducing the strain is possible through proper planning and a more 'structured' team/sponsor relationship I'm sure - but another more easy way to do this would be by relaxing the deadlines given to these people in an effort to reduce the amount of situations where we (teams) are asking for 'So Much' in 'So little time.'

** An interesting (annoying) thing that I have seen is that more often than not, the team that an employee is working with is referred to as 'Their Team' - when in reality, it should be something like 'The Team' or 'Team XXX'. This sort of reflects how a robotics team is thought of from an Employers Standpoint when that Employer Sponsors a team and Employees are involved. The Employees working with the team can often be held responsible for the teams actions since it is 'Their Team'.

[Mr. Van]

Hello Again -

First, thank you to everyone for sharing their opinions. This is a very good discussion!

So, once again, I'm hearing that extending the build season will have the some positive effects:

1. Reduce mentor burnout by allowing mentors to schedule less frequent meetings - spreading out the same amount of work over a longer period of time. If you are calling for an extended build season so that you can reduce the number of hours you are working during the 6.5 week build, why not simply reduce those hours anyway? There is nothing stopping you - it is your choice - you can set your own schedule. If the 6.5 week schedule is too intense, make it less so.

2. An extended build season will reduce costs. No more overnight shipping, no having to build a practice robot. I can understand this argument, but it leads to more questions: Why not limit your materials to what you can obtain locally? Why do you have to build a practice robot? You are not required to build a practice robot, so you don't need to incur those added expenses.

The answer to these questions is "to remain competitive". That's not going to change.

While extending the season to reduce burnout and costs might make sense "on paper" I don't believe that in application it will come out that way. The drive to be competitive will push teams to meet with the same intensity for a longer period of time.

There is already a stop work day, and yet hundreds of teams have found ways to work around it - at great expense, but they feel it is worth it. Many have already admitted that they are in a 4-month build season as it is.
So, I ask the mentors of those teams: Have you found that you are less stressed, have more free time, are able to commit to the other elements in your life more now that you have already extended the build season?

- Mr. Van
Coach, Robodox

PS - I miss the days of whatever came in the kit, extruded aluminum, 1 sheet of plywood, wire and Small Parts...

[EricLeifermann]

Originally Posted by Mr. Van

Hello Again -

First, thank you to everyone for sharing their opinions. This is a very good discussion!

So, once again, I'm hearing that extending the build season will have the some positive effects:

1. Reduce mentor burnout by allowing mentors to schedule less frequent meetings - spreading out the same amount of work over a longer period of time. If you are calling for an extended build season so that you can reduce the number of hours you are working during the 6.5 week build, why not simply reduce those hours anyway? There is nothing stopping you - it is your choice - you can set your own schedule. If the 6.5 week schedule is too intense, make it less so.

2. An extended build season will reduce costs. No more overnight shipping, no having to build a practice robot. I can understand this argument, but it leads to more questions: Why not limit your materials to what you can obtain locally? Why do you have to build a practice robot? You are not required to build a practice robot, so you don't need to incur those added expenses.

The answer to these questions is "to remain competitive". That's not going to change.

While extending the season to reduce burnout and costs might make sense "on paper" I don't believe that in application it will come out that way. The drive to be competitive will push teams to meet with the same intensity for a longer period of time.

There is already a stop work day, and yet hundreds of teams have found ways to work around it - at great expense, but they feel it is worth it. Many have already admitted that they are in a 4-month build season as it is.
So, I ask the mentors of those teams: Have you found that you are less stressed, have more free time, are able to commit to the other elements in your life more now that you have already extended the build season?

- Mr. Van
Coach, Robodox

PS - I miss the days of whatever came in the kit, extruded aluminum, 1 sheet of plywood, wire and Small Parts...

Not to keep beating a dead horse, but with no end build day we wouldn't have to make a practice robot, which would save alot of money and time when it comes to our sheet metal sponsor. It would save the team alot of time and money when it came to buying spare motors, gears, wire, etc. Then having to put together 2 robots, then having to program and teak 2 robots(1 we have unlimited access to and can prefect and another that we have about 8 hours on practice day of competitions or 4 hours if at Championships to perfect). The overall quality of robots *should/would* increase if build season didn't have a solid end date. Want examples see VRC, FTC, and FLL.

Speaking on just 2826 if we had unlimited access to our robot this year would have been, I believe, much different for us. I believe that we would have won both regionals we went to instead of being finalist(I believe this because our auto mode would have been "perfect" and led to us being 1st after qualifications at both competitions) Our championship experience robot wise would have been different as well, not saying we would have done better in the elims, but I believe we would have seeded better in quals(again due to getting auto down on our comp bot like we had it perfect on our practice bot).


The fact of the matter is, is that no matter what the "schedule" teams are given from FIRST there will always be those people/teams who work harder and longer hours than others. Increasing the length of build season will just allow those who don't work non stop to have more time with their robots to perfect them, or those who do work non stop a chance to have a day or two off a week during build and see their family and friends or relax.

[Mark Sheridan]

I have to agree with Dustin. The 6 week build is a burden on our sponsors. The build season is during the last leg of the fiscal year, so a lot of companies are expediting to finish projects including my own. It takes up a lot of my own time but also shop time that were able to procure. Often our parts are being made in over-time. This makes determining part value tricky because of we were to report the overtime cost, it would be huge. hence, we are often forced to have an mentor to make the part to make its value zero, adding to burn-out. At this point we are begging machinists, engineers and technicians to come in to see the robot and talk about their jobs in an effort to add them to our mentor list.

To give use more time with our resources, it would be nice to make parts in November "at risk." We could then have extra time during the build season, time to have students present/operating the machines, and a chance to start CAD models earlier. Also this would prevent us from getting to carried away, because everything is at risk, so we would limit ourselves to common parts or risk making an obsolete part once the game is announced. Of course every year we compete with the pros and cons of the kit-bot frame because it could give us the same savings in time. However, drive trains have not been the bottle neck in our builds.

I should add, I don't think I would give up the practice bot even with a extend season. It has been very nice to have it around for spare parts. Also having a second data point has been nice to catch a few technical issues.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by EricLeifermann

Not to keep beating a dead horse, but with no end build day we wouldn't have to make a practice robot, which would save alot of money and time when it comes to our sheet metal sponsor. It would save the team alot of time and money when it came to buying spare motors, gears, wire, etc. Then having to put together 2 robots, then having to program and teak 2 robots(1 we have unlimited access to and can prefect and another that we have about 8 hours on practice day of competitions or 4 hours if at Championships to perfect). The overall quality of robots *should/would* increase if build season didn't have a solid end date. Want examples see VRC, FTC, and FLL.

Speaking on just 2826 if we had unlimited access to our robot this year would have been, I believe, much different for us. I believe that we would have won both regionals we went to instead of being finalist(I believe this because our auto mode would have been "perfect" and led to us being 1st after qualifications at both competitions) Our championship experience robot wise would have been different as well, not saying we would have done better in the elims, but I believe we would have seeded better in quals(again due to getting auto down on our comp bot like we had it perfect on our practice bot).


The fact of the matter is, is that no matter what the "schedule" teams are given from FIRST there will always be those people/teams who work harder and longer hours than others. Increasing the length of build season will just allow those who don't work non stop to have more time with their robots to perfect them, or those who do work non stop a chance to have a day or two off a week during build and see their family and friends or relax.

True, but how will the international teams handle an unlimited build season?

For teams like 3132 and 359, if the 2013 build season were extended how much time would you realistically have your robot if you competed at the same events?

[Siri]

Originally Posted by Mr. Van

...The answer to these questions is "to remain competitive". That's not going to change...

Forgive me, but this is making a number of assumptions that do not hold true for me.

1. Our schedule in build (and otherwise) is not such as it is simply to remain competitive. The world of FIRST is not all relative. We set a certain standard each year that we want to achieve. It's absolute. This year, it was 3pt pyramid shooting and a 30 point climb. We worked our tails off because we wanted that climb. If we'd gotten it sooner, which I guarantee we would have in a more open season (because it works beautifully on our practice bot...), the schedule would not have been as intense.

Yes, this is true even if we'd gotten trounced at our events by a couple of 1986s. We wouldn't have stopped dead in our tracks, of course, but we were more than prepared to dialed it back. Because it's not all about competition, it's about achievement. At some point, a point we're pretty much at now, our design plateaus. And we're cool with that. When we discussed trying to get full court shooting abilities and/or floor pickup--this was when we'd only been 2nd pick district semifinalists, mind--we decided against it, because we had lives.


2. This answer's shorter. We buy things we have to ship because we want our students to have experience with those real-world items. For instance, this year we bought material to mold our own polyurethane wheels. Yes, it helped us competitively (well, kinda), but we did it because the kids wanted to try it and because we wanted that climb. The same goes for the things we ask our sponsor mentors to machine--it's just great experience for the students.


In short, my answer is not to be competitive. It's to be inspirational. In many ways, this is an absolute, and in terms of robot function, it realistically plateaus (unless you're one for a total rebuild, which we're not). More time gives me more of an opportunity to do that: to gather more mentors to help more students, to engage more students for a meaningful time, to reach out to more teams in more ways, to save more money for other efforts, and yes, to 'cram' less.



In terms of competition though, I seem to have forgotten how we determined more time would change relative competitiveness of the top 1/2-1/3rd. The bottom rising I get: more time to cross-team mentor, maybe more mentors signing on...but the top? We seem to have spent most of this thread talking about how the elite and pursuing-elite teams work through the 4 months anyway, and how we all don't want to work harder than we already do. How many people actually think the Jones' would get untouchably better in an open season, or would even force us to work much harder? The Jones' I've seen here seem in favor (whether they're for the concept or not) of spreading out in an open season just as much as others. We've already heard from 67 that they don't even work the schedules we're talking about, we see Daisy's at their limit, and we know 1114's mentors are mostly weekenders. I guess I just forgot, because the gap hadn't occurred to me before.


@Brandon: I agree, there are certainly logistical issues in an open season. No argument. They may even be intractable, though I doubt it. (Are you sure this doesn't fit in the overhead bin, Sir? Perhaps we should be sponsored by American Airlines instead of FedEx.) I don't think anyone's timeline for opening the season is January 2014. It may even have to wait for more districts, but I still think it's worth talking about.

[Doug G]

This topic has been hard to get off my mind... I read Van and Sanddrag's post and agree so strongly. Then I go back to Jim's post and I also agree with him as well.

So guess what. FIRST should do what is in FIRST's mission.
- If they want to keep the feel of a 6-week build - mimicking real world engineering challenges - then go for it... Keep it 6 weeks, no withholding allowance. Some without enough mentor support or experience, may field robots that are limiting. The Jones' will continue to inspire and amaze.
- If they want to involve more students in robot building and develop a robot competition that is exciting to watch. Then open up the season. More teams will find success and the Jones' will still continue to inspire and amaze.

What I can't stand is this half way stuff. We call it 6 weeks - but it is really 3-4 months. FIRST needs to decide what direction do they want FRC to go. Which experience do they want students to have?

Personally, I think the 6 week experience is like no other experience kids face and it many ways it is a great opportunity for them to learn skills that have nothing to do with robotics. To meet an almost impossible deadline, with minimal and insufficient resources, and not a how-to-book within sight. Aren't these the characteristics employers want these days? In the end, isn't that what is most important?

As far as my burn out goes... If they go with an open build season, it will force me to cut back. I'd like to think that I can do this, but in the back of my mind, I'm afraid I might not be able to follow through. Perhaps go to set work days or mandatory days off as others suggest. It will sure test me.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by pfreivald

...And that's not even considering the "keeping up with the Joneses" work ethic that many of us middle-tier FIRST teams have--we want to become elite teams, and as I said before, I have a very hard time betting against the work ethic of the likes of Wildstang, Simbotics, Miss Daisy, and other such top-tier teams. I assume that most of them will not moderate their work schedule, but will instead squeeze every minute out that they can--and those that don't will probably stop being top-tier teams in a matter of years.

By and large the "elite" teams are already milking the 16 weeks for all it's worth. There wouldn't be any change in that regard if we went to an open competition.