How to choose programmers?

[GeeTwo]

We did tryouts this year for the first time. Everybody who didn't make varsity last year had to try out (tryouts were given by members and varsity). Everyone had to do all the tryouts, including some mechanical, wiring, and programming tasks. We kept track of both attitude and aptitude. We selected members primarily on attitude, and assigned them to departments based on a combination of aptitude and their preferences. We know we always have to get a lot of programmers to start, because there will be those who don't properly engage or get it in a couple of months. Some of these leave the team (most just stop showing up; we get this in every department), others move to other departments.

[faust1706]

We've only ever had 1 programmer for the cRIO / roboRIO. Granted that programmer has been able to do some pretty good stuff, but still only one, despite how much we beg and plead students to help her.

In 2012 the mentors decided we were going to put the kinect on our robot. The mentor that was behind this already knew exactly how the problem was going to be solved, but wasn't going to program it for the team. The solution required a strong math background to even understand, so the programmer (me) was forced into the role, even though I had never programmed in my life.

This year we got a huge influx of people who wanted to program, all of them being freshman or sophomores too. So they went through the intro to c++ class notes from a local engineering school in 2 weeks and they were good to go for the most part.

Sadly, we don't have the luxury of picking students for roles. It's really whoever steps up. We did have to establish a few dev rules this year: don't pull code for more than a day, if you push code and it causes a bug or error, fix it immediately, just typical stuff you'd follow in a dev job.