Should anything be changed?

[Matt Reiland]

I think each year we lose a few engineers because they spend so much time after work to help out the project, they end up having to sacrifice time at home with the wife and kids, I personally like the first six weeks, but I would like some kind of change that allows for revisions more than the 3 days after a competition. In my world most of the times when you are rushing to meet the timeline things get shipped that are untested and less robust than they should be, therfore we make revisions and updates until we get it right. Believe me, if you build a car with serious design or build flaws we don't just say times-up can't fix em sorry, we fix it, at whatever time or money it takes. That would only help most teams out there also. Our robot this year had about as much automation as one of Chief Delphi's wheels and we still had a bunch of problems because for our resources we were rushed. If we had more time initially or at least after the deadline to make revisions we would have had more fun watching matches instead of working the whole time in the pits. You know what, making revisions after it ships would also encourage teams to have a detailed set of prints that are up to date. That is real world. If you don't know what you just shipped looks like you can't fix it.

These are my feelings, Matt