The negative effects of FRC

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by jweston

Upon further reflection, I wanted to address the work-life balance you're talking about. This of course is not FIRST's responsibility. It is something that everyone needs to work out for themselves. A team's culture and your role within the team will have a lot to do with how much pressure you face from FRC.

To an extent I disagree:
FIRST certainly does things that can drive consequences to teams and that are well within their control, in fact, in some cases only FIRST can control these things:

The 6 week build season.
The times at events.
The way events operate.
Bag & Tag.

All of these things are directly the responsibility of FIRST and only FIRST.
That said a person can make this much worse for themselves easily.

As someone that has routinely watched interest in FRC evaporate over the expectations it brings along: I don't worry too much that FIRST seems dead-set on maintaining the status quo. Like any situation these decisions cause a trade off with these choices they drive and that creates limits. FRC will be bound by these limits and it's not for me to judge if that's good or bad. FRC still drives value as it is.

The issue, I think, is that as teams try to break the limits of what FRC is, there is an exponential curve and the closer to straight up at the end you get, the more unrealistic the restrictions on FRC become except in a very specific set of circumstances. There are definitely aspects of FRC, in particular among the FIRST competitions, that favor a strong year round educational setting beyond simply FRC itself. If one tries to cram that education into just the FRC package it will become unworkable at some point without an increasingly unlikely set of circumstances existing. Therefore I have found that sometimes teams are more successful if they concentrate less on more education within the FRC construct and more on the design of their robot even if they resort to largely hand tools.

In the end, where we agree, is that you need to do what is right for you:
If FRC is causing you pain then it's time to re-evaluate whether you can align to the limits of FRC.
If one can't - don't expect FRC to adapt you - over 20 years I've discovered that FRC, when confronted with problems, has gotten just big enough that it can take far more than voting and even evidence to get alteration in direction.
To some extent this inertia is logical: FRC wants to grow and thrive but it can't do that if it breaks with the status quo too much, or else FIRST will make the mixture for success hard to determine even for the veteran teams.

Written by me, speaking for me, as someone with 20+ years of experience with FRC in particular, getting close to 10 years of experience with FLL and 2 years of FTC. Keep FRC11/FRC193 out of this <- it is not wrong to talk about the limits of a system even a system called FIRST.