Limits on Team Hours

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

As someone who is starting to get into this whole "real world" thing, I can tell you that's simply not true. There are countless situations in the real world where time caps are in place for many reasons. Labor laws, union regulations, funding issues, work site availability, and contract stipulations are all very frequent reasons for why time limits exist in the real world. Collin gave an example of one situation just a couple posts ago.

Time caps are part of the real world, and the team may very well have to find a way to work with them. 200 hours isn't a terribly small amount of time. Based on some scratch paper calculations and my fuzzy memory, I doubt I spent much more than 200 hours in any particular build season I've been involved in. And I know that the average student on my teams definitely doesn't spend more than 200 hours.
If you feel you need more time, work to try and raise the cap. But it will likely be much easier to make exceptions for individual students rather than the team as a whole. Especially if the key students who need to spend more time also have great grades.

As someone who is in a significantly different "real world" I can say your mileage may vary. Some industries have labor laws or funding limits that limit your amount of time. My company has neither of these. I know people who have left the building at 4 am and been back at 8 am the next day. It isn't normal but the job must get done. But that is not normal. It is usually because of an emergency (server explodes) or because they broke something. Or it could just be because they have nothing better to do.

In FIRST though you don't get fined when your robot doesn't work at 100% by week 3 of the build season. There is absolutely no reason to kill yourselves. Remember, this is supposed to be fun.

As for the specific number. 200 hrs in 6 weeks works out to 33 hrs a week. I don't know about your school but I know that is a crazy amount of time if you add it onto the 35-40 hrs/ week of school. How do your mentors even spend that much time there? I know that the thought of spending 30+ hrs a week in addition to the 40+ (sometimes as high as 60) I work in a week would kill me.