Most undervalued job

[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.