Most undervalued job

[smurfgirl]

Originally Posted by Doug Leppard

From past 5 years experience, it is the battery person. Not done right it will kill you. done right you will do well but nobody notices.

We didn't always have a battery person, we just had a few scattered chargers and batteries. We never knew how long they had charged or if they had any problems, which meant that we would often go into a match with an undercharged or damaged battery. The problems this caused became especially clear last year, when low battery made it impossible for our robot to climb the 30 degree incline on the ramp. We realized the problems it caused at our regional, and before we went to last year's championship we had one of our members create a charging system with charging sheets and number batteries to track it. In this process, our "battery man" discovered that we had several faulty batteries, which we labeled accordingly and replaced. This year, our system progressed to the point where our battery man effectively managed our energy at the UTC Connecticut regional and the Championship Event... and he even helped out our alliance partners. We worship our battery man, so that's definitely not an undervalued role on 1124.

As for the people who have undervalued scouters on their teams, we also do not have that problem. Again, last year, our scouting was at a deficit. We didn't realize what we were missing until we met with our alliance partners for the elimination rounds and saw the kinds of incredibly valuable information we had been missing out on. That's when we tried to find a better (aka existant) system of scouting. We tried a new one out at the Championship Event last year, but nothing really fell into place until Bash @ the Beach this year. Between the off-season events and the scrimmage, our team had a scouting team break off and develop a system for scouting other teams. By the regional this year, our scouting captain had things mostly under control. At both the regional and the Championship, the other coach and I were indebted to our scouters for providing us with information that allowed us to create winning strategies to complement our robot.

Our team also values the positions typically thought of as key roles, such as the drive team, strategists, and programmers (though the programmers are often the subject of jokes... but it's all in good fun).

I'd have to say that there are several undervalued roles on our team, including spirit, community relations, and organization.

From personal experience, I would have to say that spirit makes a huge difference in the dynamics of a team. Not only does it get the team noticed, but it adds to the excitement and energy of a team. Being down on the field and seeing your team sitting there with long faces doesn't get you pumped up. Hearing them cheering for you and supporting you through good and bad, on the other hand, can provide a little extra push and makes things more fun for everyone. Our team is very reserved, and has many inhibitions about being loud. They think they're embarrassing themselves, but they don't realize how much fun they're missing out on. I usually end up as the only one screaming my lungs out and clapping until my hands are numb, when I get the chance to sit in the stands, anyway.

Our community relations are also something I feel is undervalued. We don't have a set way of communicating with the our community, including our school, our sponsors, and finding ways to get information around. Also, I want to get more involved in our community with younger students in the school system because I think that the public schools don't do a very good job of teaching appreciation for the math and sciences. I want to show kids how much fun technology it can be and explain some of its applications, but whereas I've done some things on my own time, the team generally is "too busy" to bring the robot on tour to the elementary schools or something of the sort. Now that the main season is over, I really hope that we can work on this point.

And finally... organizational skills. As people have mentioned with the organization of tools, I think it's ridiculous when it takes our team half an hour to find the tool to fix something when the fix will only take five minutes. It's a waste of our valuable time during our six-week build season and during our competitions, and it's just a bad habit to get into in general. Good organizational skills with tools and parts can make of a world of a difference with a team. For our team especially, packing is a major issue. People throw parts into boxes without really noticing if they'll be useful or where they ended up. We thought we had overpacked for the Championship in 2006, when we had eleven plastic and cardboard boxes in addition to our crate... this year we had fifteen, plus an overweight crate. Getting back is even worse. Though I acknowledge that we were out on the field until the last match at both of our competitions this year, it's beyond ridiculous that we've gotten ushered out of the pits as the last people there on a repeated basis. They had the field completely disassembled and carried out at the UTC Regional (both in 2006 and 2007) by the time we had finished packing. And at the Championship yesterday we didn't make it to the party until 9 pm because packing became such an ordeal. So again, organization is definitely one of the more undervalued aspects of my team.

Anyway, that's my insight into how jobs go on the ÜberBots. (Other ÜberBots may feel free to disagree with me, as long as they explain why.)

[Billfred]

There's a few that really should be made more important than is often the case:

1) Battery Guy (or Battery Girl, as appropriate), for reasons already mentioned.

2) Media rep. Three robots since, I'd kill for any videos or pictures of my rookie year robot.

3) Marketing, in nearly any sense of the word. (A subset of this would be any degree of graphic design. Just applying a little bit of aesthetic design work to your signs, shirts, and robot can make a world of difference. I think we can all agree that this looks much better than this--and that took about an hour and a half and $16.25 at USC's computer lab.)

4) The role dubbed by the kids when I was on 1293 "Rules Nazi". I think the politically correct phrase is Compliance Officer, but that's more syllables. Having one guy who internalizes the whole manual and makes sure the robot is within the rules (even if it means irritating the rest of the team to the brink of insanity) is a lovely thing come inspection time.

[galewind]

Two of the most under-appreciated jobs at competitions are scouting captains and scouting team members. You never know how successful your team will be at a competition, and need to be prepared to select from a large list of teams, depending upon the event you're at. If you get seated at the top, you truly need to know who the best teams are that complement your style of gameplay, and who consistently perform well at the given tasks.

Often times, the scouting crew's work is never used (due to the inability to pick), so their hard work often times goes to naught, making them incredibly under-appreciated. This year, we started off 5-0 on Friday night in Newton, and had a three-hour scouting meeting in one of our hotel rooms. Due to a motor burn-out in the first of two near-consecutive rounds, we lost both rounds, ending at 5-2, and were unable to select alliance partners. In fact, we didn't get picked, so all of their work was un-usable.

On the positive side, I believe a lot of our students learned to truly appreciate the benefits of a good scouting team when we saw the alliance captains choose some very surprising picks.

[Cuog]

IMHO from our team the least appreciated jobs are the programming(the first thing blamed for anything both being serious and sarcastic)
Then there is the Animation team which catches a lot of flak for wasting time(ok so they did this year but before then it wasn't their fault)
Chairmans gets neglected a lot, usually someone is sent into the corner and told not to come out until they have something to show.
In general cleaning is ignored on the team because whenever someone is seen not doing something they are then told to clean so they start to hate the job because they never get to help the fun part(making the mess)

These are all my observations from what happens on my team and something I would advise rookies to watch out for. Also my advice to rookie teams would be to make sure that no matter what someone is always doing something. Having dedicated members is great but don't forget about the rest of them that want to learn and help too.