The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[Brandon Holley]

In the Stereotyping of Successful Teams thread, we stumbled onto the age old topic of the 6 week build season and how it effects competitiveness and mentor burnout. Instead of hijacking that thread, I felt it appropriate to start a new thread.

These were the relevant posts leading up to this thread:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...2&postcount=81

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...3&postcount=83

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...8&postcount=84

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...3&postcount=87

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...1&postcount=92

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...0&postcount=93

Originally Posted by JesseK

(This isn't a have-not soapbox ... I have a wonderment...)

On our team, time has always been against us. The 6 week build season is hard, and it's tough to get time out of the work days during build season to get to the school without project managers going ape s---. "Only putting in 40 hours a week? Ha. There goes your technical career." It has led to a lot of mentor burn-out, particularly when the 6 week build season is stretched out to 16 weeks in the pursuit of making software and 30lbs of robot better. The few weeks after the end of build few of us even want to think about a robot, let alone have to tweak it. Even one of the prominent FiM guys REALLY wants to do away with the 6-week cycle altogether, exposing more teams with low mentor resources to more burn-out. I'd be curious to see how the more elite teams deal with this via their team structure, mentor recruiting, etc.

One last point: teams don't even need to perform very well on the field to be talked about negatively. Simply powder-coating the robot because a sponsor has requested it every year is enough for many individuals to treat a team with this type of disrespect.

Originally Posted by Adam Freeman

What would cause more mentor burn-out, trying to get a robot completed in 6 weeks, or trying to get on completed in 7, 8, or 9 weeks?

Teams are working non-stop right past the 6-week build window anyways, tweaking, practicing, iterating, etc...

We just stopped "working" on robotics this week, for basically the first time all year, this week!

Are we burned out? Sure. But, most of the issues were trying to build parts that couldn't be tested on a robot that was sitting next to us in a bag. This leads to a lot of problems that could have been easily solved in our build space. Instead we had to work all week creating parts, only to work all weekend at the competition getting them to work correctly.

Access to the robot has no bearing on whether we are away from home/work working on the robot.

Removing the barrier from the robot, and allowing more access to it, is supposed to allow low-mentor resource teams additional time with the robot, so they can keep up with the other teams that don't stop working when the 6-week build is over.

-Adam

Originally Posted by Chris Hibner

I agree with Adam on this one. I would be less burnt out if the 6 week limitation was removed. As he said, it sucked having to make a bunch of extra stuff to try and make a practice robot work, not to mention wiring another entire robot and making configurations in your software since you don't have identical speed controller/sensors/etc. on both robots. Even after all that effort the practice bot never works quite right so there's even more time spent fixing those issues.

Additionally, most of the my burnout stems from having to leave work early and work until late at night because we have an artificial 6 week deadline. If I could work my normal schedule and get home at a reasonable time for another week, I would prefer that over the craziness that happens in the latter stages of the build season.

Originally Posted by EricH

Sorry, Adam, but I must disagree. I believe it's known as Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the allotted time.

What I mean is this: Expand the season to 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 weeks, and I'm willing to bet that you will STILL spend multiple hours a day, multiple days a week, every week, trying to iterate a newer and better item, reworking the robot between Week 1 and your first competition when you realize that your design isn't working out, doing a lot of things to make the robot perform better, or even just driver practice.

The ONLY thing that will be different is... wait for it...

... You'll have your competition robot to do it on. That means you don't need to build a practice robot. Assuming that you did that after bag day anyway (or before building the competition robot), you really aren't saving that much wear and tear on yourself, because you're still running into the "Just one more tweak" from 3 or 4 different directions, which leads to more late nights, more nights, later nights...


Basically, what I'm saying is that by allowing teams to work longer, they will do just that, resulting in even more burnout. It's just human nature. I would almost go so far as to say that it won't help the teams you're trying to help, it'll hurt them. Almost.

Originally Posted by Adam Freeman

I don't want to drag this out, and maybe it's a topic of discussion for a different thread...

But, I can't believe that a "lower" level team having 24/7 access to their robot to practice with, iterate, etc... could be anything but a good thing.

I understand that will lead to more time committment and work for them, if they choose to continue to fill the time. But, is that worse than not having access to their robot and showing up to competition after competition not being able to execute the designed game tasks?

Maybe they needed another week to get a shooter working, or get a climber or drivetrain adjusted. It's pretty hard to do major adjustments and tweaking at a competition.

With more access to the robot, do they have to meet every day....or can they meet every other day? Can they adjust their schedules to get more time with the machine, but also a better mix of time at work and home as well?

As I said before, the top teams are already doing more anyways with a practice bot. 2056 and 1114 are practicing 4-5hrs every day. 254 is re-designing an already awesome climber to be even better. 67 is trying to get partially functioning climber working to it's full potential. This is already happening.

Basically, when there is work to be done...we put in whatever time is required to get it done. Example - Last year we rolled out of the gate at Waterford and the robot was essentially "perfect". After that we did not mess with it or tweak it at all (outside of some minor autonomous improvements), all season. This year was different. We were not ready and continued to work all season to get to the point we wanted to get too. We (67) are going to do what it takes to attempt to meet our goals. If we don't need to do more work, we won't. If we need too we will.

We've talked about raising the floor. Giving the "floor" more access to their machine does exactly that. Jim Zondag has data that shows more competitions and more access to the robot leads to better performance.

Will it just create a mean shift of performance for all teams? Yeah, most likely, but it may also tighten up the difference between the best and worst teams. We are probably approaching the limits on how much better the best teams can get.

This thread just seems weird to me, that a discussion about how 341 worked harder to be better, leads to an arguement that handicapping the best teams and restricting access (not having more access) to the robot for lower level teams is for the betterment of FIRST's mission.

IDK, maybe my perspective is just one sided.

-Adam

Originally Posted by pathew100

I have had the same thoughts about this for a while. If you take out the need for teams to build a practice robot it saves a ton of resources and tightens up the competiton.

"Six Weeks" is a fallacy now anyways. It's really six weeks to build 75% of your robot (by weight).

And software isn't included so if you want to keep up with the "elite" or just have auto code that works you need to build a practice robot so you have a platform to test your code on.

And bumpers and controls aren't included, so you don't need to worry about them until after bag day...

So when does "Build Season" stop exactly?