Advice- Too many Programmers?

[AlexanderTheOK]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

Between the code that runs on your robot, your driver station/dashboard, your website, your scouting system, automating your pit checklist, off-line tools for generating autonomous mode scripts, off-line tools for visualizing logged data, etc. etc... "there is not enough to do" is never an excuse for bored programmers.

one little issue I've always had in the back of my mind, and in the back because my team has always been on the low end (2-5) of robot programmers is that these are 7 NEW programmers.

Autonomous scripting? Well first you need to know how to make a solid system that uses state machines (and obviously sensors) properly. That does actually take experience to do. It takes time on an actual robot. Again, not too much of an issue for teams that have lots of functional robots, lots of time, and not lots of programmers, but it could easily be a problem for a programming team of 15.

Now, while I imagine that if half of your fifteen are going into web development and making your scouting system, you get down to a manageable 7, where enough time and accessible hardware make it possible for programmers to gain that experience, but robot programming really takes contiguous programming experience.

I can see it being done, but it is a challenge.