The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[JesseK]

Forget the build cycle, the practice bots, etc.

The level of dedication required to sustain a successful technical career and a successful team as a mentor will continue to rise, eventually beyond a tipping point, for a team that wants to make it into Eliminations or better at Championships. The technical job market, where nerds compete to have meaningful impact on the projects at work for which they're passionate, is far more competitive than even IRI. A wife & house on top of that is hard enough, but add kids into the mix and it'd get tougher still.

Mentors are the keystone to the level of competitiveness in FRC -- and any student on a highly competitive team is better for it in the long run. Some geographic areas lack one type of mentor or another (for example, my area is light on the mechanical side but is overflowing with software & business). One solution is to get more mentors involved -- but how, on a sustainable basis? Another is to partner teams up who are heavy on one, yet light on another, but that's another topic for another thread (and something we're trying for 2014).

The posts quoted after me in this thread showcase an interesting few points, and I waited to respond to Adam until a few more people came in. My original statement wasn't to start an argument, but really to start a discussion on how 341 and other very successful teams are able to motivate their team to excellence for 4 months of out of the year. Is there a core of mentors who can come in when needed? Is there 'that 1 guy who loves the robot more than life'? Are the kids told 'the mentors are here, and so you shall be as well"? We've tried a variety of things on my team, with mixed results. I'd love to hear what works for a given team's circumstances.

I think that the specific discussion regarding removal of the 6-week cap is far bigger than ChiefDelphi. There are many voices which aren't represented on these forums. The 9-person team I talked to last night (1 technical mentor) doesn't have anyone who even reads CD, for example.

[Adam Freeman]

Originally Posted by JesseK

Forget the build cycle, the practice bots, etc.

The level of dedication required to sustain a successful technical career and a successful team as a mentor will continue to rise, eventually beyond a tipping point, for a team that wants to make it into Eliminations or better at Championships. The technical job market, where nerds compete to have meaningful impact on the projects at work for which they're passionate, is far more competitive than even IRI. A wife & house on top of that is hard enough, but add kids into the mix and it'd get tougher still.

Mentors are the keystone to the level of competitiveness in FRC -- and any student on a highly competitive team is better for it in the long run. Some geographic areas lack one type of mentor or another (for example, my area is light on the mechanical side but is overflowing with software & business). One solution is to get more mentors involved -- but how, on a sustainable basis? Another is to partner teams up who are heavy on one, yet light on another, but that's another topic for another thread (and something we're trying for 2014).

The posts quoted after me in this thread showcase an interesting few points, and I waited to respond to Adam until a few more people came in. My original statement wasn't to start an argument, but really to start a discussion on how 341 and other very successful teams are able to motivate their team to excellence for 4 months of out of the year. Is there a core of mentors who can come in when needed? Is there 'that 1 guy who loves the robot more than life'? Are the kids told 'the mentors are here, and so you shall be as well"? We've tried a variety of things on my team, with mixed results. I'd love to hear what works for a given team's circumstances.

I think that the specific discussion regarding removal of the 6-week cap is far bigger than ChiefDelphi. There are many voices which aren't represented on these forums. The 9-person team I talked to last night (1 technical mentor) doesn't have anyone who even reads CD, for example.

Jesse,

I agree with your statement here. Yes, comitting time was much easier 10 years ago (when I was a lowly engineer) than now. I've made plenty of decisions or non decisions that may or may not have adversly affected my career. These are all conscious decisions to continue with this program instead of making advancement in other areas (although there are plenty of other factors that went into the decisions). Once my kids were born, it became even harder, to commit additional time. One of the reasons we work the schedule we do, is because there is no way to commit any additional time.

This season was terrible for burn-out. Trying to get a climber developed and build put such a strain on all aspects of our robot that many of us were ready to walk away after this season. But, after seeing it all come together and having a great experience at MSC / Championships...I don't think (hope) we will lose any mentors.

To keep the team working for the entire 4 months of the year, we have a couple "really" dedicated mentors that are around all the time to help get stuff done. They really are the backbone of our entire operation. The rest of us provide the knowledge base for what we are going to do and how to do it, but they are the ones that really get it done. There's no way I could invest any additional time than I already do...but, I still think it would be easier to spread that time out over the entire season, than trying to cram it into 6 weeks.

Our core group of mentors is not getting any younger. So to help counter act this, we are looking into opening up our mentor base to former students that we feel would be able to develop into mentors. In addition to any former FIRST students that hire into the GM proving grounds that would be interested in helping out.

I agree... CD is a very small minority of the total teams in FIRST. Nothing is going to decided here, but it is a fun discussion!

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by MikeL303

Why do mentors get burned out?

Mentoring a team during build season can be a full-time job. Add that on top of a "real" full-time job and something's going to have to give. Six weeks is about the limit for neglecting family and for postponing downtime.

I am convinced that a firm "stop build" date is a very good thing.

[Bongle]

Pretty burned-out mentor here. I had too much non-FIRST stuff going on this year, and found that robotics was a bit of a chore. I'm always nonplussed about build season, but this year felt really bad. Between work, a start-up, and a girlfriend, I was massively overstretched. Our main mentor is fortunate enough to be retired, but as a working stiff I'm finding less and less time for FIRST.

The 6-week season absolutely must be kept, and I'd be happy if they eliminated the withholding allowance too. Top-end teams will build practice bots, but top-end teams will always find a way to be better whether the season is long or not. I had to skip out on the mid-february-until-first-competition build season this year, and I felt awful about it. I shouldn't feel like I'm abandoning my team by not showing up after build season.

Here's the problem:
-Extending the build season would certainly raise the floor of performance, but it would also raise the ceiling. Teams that perform near the bottom now would perform near the bottom with an official 9-week build season. Their robot might be better at the game, but everyone else's robot would be better at it too. Human psychology and satisfaction isn't interested in absolute performance, it's interested in relative performance. And coming dead last feels just as bad whether your robot can score (9 weeks) or not (6 weeks).
-Put another way, the build season is a bit of an arms race: if everyone spends 3 more weeks, then that's 3 more weeks of neglected homework, children, and jobs for essentially zero gain. The extra 3 weeks will probably not gain you any ground on any other teams, because they'll also be working for an extra 3 weeks.
-Teams can't really say "well we're just going to work for 6 weeks", because that guarantees that they'll get beaten by the teams that are willing to sacrifice their non-FIRST lives more.
-If FIRST were to make the build season officially longer, they'd probably make the games proportionally more difficult, so you'd still have teams unable to perform any of the tasks. It's not like we'd have 9 weeks to achieve the same bar we have now: the bar would be higher.


Here's a proposal to enforce a short build season: have the drive station software stop working between the end of build season until thursday of the competitions that that team is registered for, along with the reinstatement of "raw materials only" being brought to competitions. Boom: no more practice robots, no more february->march build season, no more 4-months of daily meetings to be competitive.

[Clem1640]

If we kept the rule concerning ending work on a certain date (the old ship date; now a bag & tag date for most events), then 6 weeks is appropriate. If this were 7 or 8 weeks, we would continue to work as intensely, but for additional time. We build a nice, designed robot, but frankly, it is never really "done". ...On the other hand, 6 months would reduce the pressure...

Maintaining the current intensity for 1 or 2 more weeks would not be an improvement from a burn-out standpoint; just worse. It would also seem to necessitate a delay in the competition season, which is probably impractical, given that this runs to the end of April now.

On the other hand, if the robot remained accessible for modification throughout the competition season (no bag & tag), it might reduce burn out a little (although I have some reservations). Mostly, this would eliminate the need for competitive teams to build a second robot (which helps).

[Chief Hedgehog]

Forgive me as this is my first post - and seeing how we bungled out first season, this may be bumpy.

As a rookie team, I see the benefits of a determined build season. We started our team with a relatively large group of mentors (12). Each and every mentor was worth their weight in gold. However, since this was a venture that was new to the mentors and the companies that they work for, we quickly realized that we were taxing our local sponsors and their talent (our mentors). If we had pushed beyond a 6 week build season, I am not sure if our sponsors would have allowed more time.

Becker is a small community and sports are not just activities, but act as entertainment for the locals. Most of my 24 robotics athletes are also competing in winter and Spring sports (When we have a spring). However, we were not able to utilize the time between our NorthStar Regional and FRC Championships because my team was either finishing their winter sports of Basketball, Wrestling, Hockey or getting primed for Tennis, LaCrosse, Baseball, etc. All 6 of my senior boys are also involved in our Tennis Team which has made it to state that last 4 years. They will most likely do so this year.

We did very well for our first year by building a Robot very different from most (Many from Galileo may remember seeing our C.I.S. 4607 Banners hanging from our shot blocker). We concentrated on defense and climbing for ten. This did well for us as we were awarded the Rookie All-Star and also won the regional in large part to the Iron Lions (967) and the Fighting Calculators (2175).

For us rookie teams not knowing what to expect, a determined 6 week build season is great. I am not sure if I could have held my team together much longer...