Lead mentor is difficult to work with

Competition Team Organization
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This is from a random account to hide the identity of the team I am on.

So my team this year had a pretty successful season considering the challenges we faced along the way. Our team had a low shooter that climbed high. This design was kinda forced upon us by our lead mentor, as I had really wanted was a high shooter, with a hood and turret, but the turret and hood were probably a stretch. The high shooter from the fender definitely could’ve been done with the time we had, but our lead mentor rejected the idea over and over again saying that “No one is going to be able to shoot accurately high”, even when I talking about just shooting high at the fender and no where else. When I even mention trying a hood or turret in the offseason, our lead mentor again would say that “That’s too difficult, only the rich teams with NASA and Google engineers can do that”. This has lead to a lot of the new freshman this year also being convinced that “Only the rich teams have mentors that do everything can do turrets, hood, and swerve”, basically believing that you gotta have money or mentors that build your robot for you to be successful. Also even though our mentor has been mentoring this FRC team for years, he told me that shooting with a turret, hood, and driving at the same time would draw too much current and that only the “NASA teams” can do it because they do crazy calculations and figure some magic out.

Our high climber worked quite well, but it couldn’t climb to traversal. Early in the build season, around week 1 I had raised the idea of a really pretty simple traversal climber (similar to 3357) that would well be within our capabilities. This idea was also immediately shot down by our lead mentor as we had already voted on an idea (there were no other ideas at the time we voted) and apparently that idea had been set in stone, even though at that point no parts had been ordered and only a very basic proof of concept had been made. Our lead mentor told me I could work on it, but I couldn’t “distract” anyone else from what they are supposed to be doing, basically implying that I gotta build the entire thing by myself I wanted to do it.

I am also one of the programmers on the our team would frequently be asked by our lead mentor and our president if the code I was testing for the robot was actually necessary, even though I would be doing something essential like characterizing the drivetrain or tuning a PID for the shooter. Then whenever my code didn’t work the first time the programming lead, president, and lead mentor would tell me to get rid of that code if it wasn’t necessary and to work on something more productive.

Then at our regional, we did quite well and ranked higher than our team has ever ranked 11th (we usually rank near dead last around 40th). We were expecting to get picked and didn’t, which was quite disappointing, but our lead mentor then immediately blamed it on politics between the teams. He said that the reason we weren’t picked is because some teams helped others machine parts and that their mentors all knew each other and had this planned out beforehand which is why they were chosen over us even though, definitely we had a better robot that some of the teams that were chosen.

I admit that this will definitely be somewhat biased towards my opinion and it also has me kinda rambling, as I’m kinda frustrated and think our team has so much more potential. But I’m not really sure what to do in this situation, as I want to see our team attempt more difficult things and succeed, but all my ideas just get shot down and anything slightly “difficult” is deemed impossible. I also know that I’m pushing for ideas that our team has never done before, but you can never succeed if you never try right? I’m not even sure if I want to continue doing FRC, as I have to deal with the lead mentor of our program denying everything I say. If any mentors out there have any opinions that could help shed light on what our lead mentor’s thought process (like maybe he just wants to play it safe and not try anything hard?), and if maybe I should just compromise for whatever the team wants instead and not push for any hard ideas.

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I had a similar issue when I was a student. It was pretty difficult, but ultimately my philosophy didn’t align with my teams. I ended up switching to a community team which shared my ideals more closely which led to a much better experience for me. But obviously “just leave” isn’t exactly a viable solution for most people. Some mentors tend to get stuck in their ways, and not want to change, which can be a big hinderance when you have passionate students who want to try something new. I’d see what your fellow teammates (ie students) think about design challenges and how they think the team should move forward. If all the students agree with the mentor, it’d be a lot harder to push for change than if all the students also feel held back. Depending on what the other students want may impact your decisions and plan of action.

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Having a turret, hood or something “crazy” like that is not impossible, it just takes time to learn how to do it. One example is my own experience when I began my FRC journey, when I joined my team (We are from Mexico) nobody had any real idea what we were doing, we were really excited because we managed to use two pistons that moved a tab… We slowly but surely got better and better, until eventually we became one of the tops teams in Mexico, and the first mexican team to implement a swerve drive successfully. The essence of FIRST, as I see it, is being able to learn and challenge yourself, always trying to push the limits in the smartest way possible. I don’t agree with the ideologies of your mentor, they basically think that if they don’t know how to do it it’s impossible to learn… It’s something I have seen in other teams and it just leads to frustration and feeling like everyone that is better than you is cheating.

If its possible I would recommend you search other teams you could join, or try and speak with your team’s leadership over the summer to see if any improvements could be made.

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^This made me laugh out loud. Honestly shooting and driving is a ton less power draw than playing defense. While some teams have implemented “magic” power management, the secret is mostly just taking the time to do a good job wiring, and upsizing your power wires.

^This made me cringe. I’ve had my share of frustration with programmers wasting time on pointless stuff (like trying to get a custom LOLCode interpreter working 2 hours before an outreach event where we needed the robot to drive.) But it’s important that programming gets enough time with the robot. Code is what divides good robots from great robots.

^This made me kinda sad. I’m sure this kind of thing happens, but I highly doubt that was the problem here. Sometimes all you have to do is go introduce yourself to other teams and show them your scouting data about why you think they should pick you.

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I think there’s little chance you can change anything this season, but you might be able to affect some change in the off-season. Which is probably the right way to go; trying something radical (or something seen as radical) during build season contains a lot of risk. Doing it in the off-season will be, at worst, a waste of some money.
When this season ends, I recommend you go to your lead mentor and tell them that you want to try something new in the off-season. Suggest a project that is ambitious but practical, like a simple hooded shooter (no turret, no angle adjustments).
Go to them with a plan, not just an idea. Show them pictures and CAD models from teams who have designed the kind of mechanism you’re going for this season, preferably less successful teams (so you won’t get hit with “yeah but they have a lot of money and mentors”). You can also contact other teams in your area who have built hooded shooters (in this example) and get them to help you with this off-season project.
Essentially, what I’m saying is, make it as easy as possible for your mentor to say yes.
Also, when you talk to them, make sure to use positive language (i.e. “I think we have a chance to improve our team and we should take it”, not “you blocked us from building a better robot”).

A few other recommendations:

  1. Try to understand where your mentor is coming from. It sounds like your mentor has had several seasons of disappointment, putting in a lot of work just to end up ranked at the bottom. It really sucks to experience that (trust me - been there), and it especially sucks to experience it as a mentor. Our jobs as mentors isn’t to help you build a good robot, it’s to help you learn and develop, and to help you have a good experience. It really sucks to watch your students go home sad after another bad competition.
    It seems to me that your mentor was just trying to get you to succeed, and they decided playing it safe is the best way to do it. You may not agree with their plan (I personally don’t), but you can’t deny that it worked. I’m sure that despite not being selected, reaching 11th place was a thrill for some of you (maybe even you personally).

  2. Form connections with other teams in your area. Arrange visits at other workshops. Ask the top teams in your region to have your team over and explain their robot and their process to you. Like I wrote before, ask another team to help you with your off-season project. You will see that a lot of teams will be happy to have you over and to help you. Some teams might even agree to manufacture parts for you, so that your project won’t be limited by your resources.
    These bonds with other teams are important. You will learn a lot, you will make friends, and you will form connections that will help your team for years. Unlike your mentor’s claim, teams rarely pick friends over good robots in alliance selection, but it does happen. If it does, that’s one more hurdle these connections will clear.

  3. You can learn a lot about robot design online. There is a YouTube series called behind the bumpers where elite teams explain their robots. Watch those videos. Many teams (including top tier teams like 118 and 148) publish their robots’ CAD models. Download models of robots with systems similar to what you want to design, see how they did it. That will help you come up with a better design with less iteration.
    Share these resources with your team, and your mentor. Show them that there’s no magic behind those bumpers.

Good luck.

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I like yo use this and then many of the robots listed have cad, reveal vids, and behind the Bumpers, etc. A fantastic resource. https://robotics.nasa.gov/downloads/nasarap-rdc-v101.pdf

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Might be time to find another team?

If you can, better might be to sit with this mentor, and a neutral third party, and tell him how you feel. Calm snd rational.

But keep in mind, experience counts for much more than you might know. Maybe he knows all too well about team capabilities and scope creep.

Third alternative: Counter the objections with science. If you do the calculations and show that shooting and driving doesn’t dry enough current to cause a problem, it’s hard to argue against it. You may have to challenge him so that he has to do the math to prove his assertions are correct. But you need to do the math first to make sure you’re standing on solid ground.

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I’d say off-season is your key to advancing your teams tech. Plus “learn from the best”!

The build season is VERY short. For virtually all teams you can’t afford to have more than maybe one or at most two things on the bot that is new to your team and/or out of your comfort zone and still get it working. Our team went for a turret this year and, two comps in, we haven’t rotated it yet. It’s been bolted in place… of course, the three week sheet metal delay might be related to that :wink:

Folks on our team have been dreaming of swerve for years… to support that we built a summer of swerve bot with lots of 3DP parts in my garage. We sorta got it running by kickoff :frowning: Maybe one more summer to make it a viable tool!

Another thing to keep in mind: each new thing has at least 4 aspects, all of which your team needs to address: mechanical, electrical, programming, and driving. We got the mechanical on swerve pretty quickly. Electrical took a pretty good while… then programming took a LONG time. We drove it about 30 feet total before we had to focus on kickoff and cannibalize it for parts :frowning:

Oh, and when selling an off season technology project, stress the “training freshman” aspect!

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One of the keys to being successful is building within your means. Teams that try something they don’t have the ability (based on experience, machine resources, money, etc) to implement well will do worse than teams that do something simpler very well. That may be your mentor’s motivation, but if so it doesn’t sound like it’s being communicated clearly.

I recommend spending some time with the team as a whole in the offseason working on your team culture. Create a mission statement and core values (if you don’t have them already). Create some documentation about how the team is run, how decisions are made, and what your goals are going into the season. Getting everyone on the same page in terms of the team culture really is the first step towards getting everyone on the same page in terms of the robot design.

It takes some time and effort, but one of the key aspects to really understanding engineering is looking at the tradeoffs. Pursuing a more complicated design means more time and effort. When my team does our initial analysis each season, we look at all the options (nothing is considered off the table). But this season, for example, we worked together to put up estimates on the amount of effort for each item we wanted to accomplish with the robot. With a rookie-heavy team, that meant that the mentors were putting in a lot of input for the “amount of effort” to do something (more than we generally like to). We never said “no” to something, but we did help them understand how much time and effort would be required for a traverse climb, and how that would impact our ability to do other things (like shoot well, finish early so we have driver practice and can get autonomous modes working, etc). We like to say that our job, as mentors, is to help them find a way to get their design to work.

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I was wondering this too. From OP’s recounting, there are definitely examples of the mentor having a negative attitude that can transfer to the students, putting all the fault for the team’s limited success on other teams. But I also picked out of the OP’s story this sequence of events:

  1. OP wanted to build X
  2. Mentor said no, we need to build Y
  3. Team built Y
  4. Team ranked higher than they ever have before

Certainly the mentor should check themself about instilling negativity/defeatism in the students, and I acknowledge that on-field performance is not the only aspect of “success”, but it’s not obvious to me that the mentor made the wrong call on the technical decisions.

My question for the OP: do other students and mentors share your frustrations with this mentor/attitude? Every team finds a balance between “do as well as we can at competition” and “try exciting new ideas* that might not work”. If the overall team leans toward doing well at comps and you’re the outlier that wants to try more ambitious, risky ideas, then I agree with the advice that you may want to find another team that’s more aligned with your goals. If most of the team agrees with you and this mentor is the outlier, then I would recommend talking to another mentor to see if they have any ideas on how to bring this mentor into alignment with the rest of the team.

*new, exciting, ambitious, risky, etc for your team. Doing something your team has never done before will always be somewhat risky, even if hundreds of other teams have done it

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Just a small clarification: the team tanked high but wasn’t picked, implying that their seed was mostly good luck or that their robot was otherwise not competitive in elims. The mentor might see this as a win but there’s no good way to differentiate between the two without asking alliance captains directly.

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So how did the design decisions on what your team’s robot work. Was it lead mentor just decided or was it a team decision with the sense that there was a vote you got out voted? Were you able to explain your side? How did this whole process work exactly? If its the former that sucks and I’m sorry that you have had a bad experience and a lead mentor should never decide how a robot is going to be. It should be a team decision where everyone’s vote including the lead mentors is the same. If its the latter then I’m sorry you got out voted but that happens sometimes.

This is something I 100% disagree with. Off-seasons are a time to try new things assuming you have the resources to do so such as money people and time.

While this sucks I can empathize where the mentor is coming from. I think their goal was to just get their design done before adding improvements to it. I know for us that was our focus let’s build the stuff we voted on and add something as needed.

As a programmer myself I’m lucky if my code works the first time. 9/10 times it doesn’t work the first time. For something like this I think you should push back a bit and explain what you’re doing and explain how it will take time.

my opinion on this is Yes and No. For this season I would focus on designing the robot your team wanted to design. For the off-season I would focus on things y’all want to do such as traversal or high shot. This way you can learn during the off season and apply next season.

Sorry if i’m not being super helpful.

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This is fairly simple to do if your team has basic manufacturing ability and good sensors. If your team can’t figure out how to make a hood for a single flywheel shooter, rotating a double flywheel shooter is an easier solution, with the bonus of less spin (although accuracy isn’t quite as good.)

They are kind of right about only the rich teams being able to do swerve; custom modules are difficult to make, and COTS modules are very expensive. ($250-$400 per module). Turrets have a pretty wide price range and can be done affordably; the cheapest COTS module is ~$300 (armabot’s turret240); ~$100 if you only get the bearing and pulley. Plus, with a COTS solution you have a lot less design work to do.

Trying something difficult in the offseason before you try it in season is a great idea. If it fails, you’re not sunk.

I’m a bit biased on this one as I am a programmer, but programming is one of the most important parts of the robot. In many years autonomous has made the difference between good teams and winning teams. A robot that is hard to drive scores fewer points, and cycle times and accuracy can be hugely improved by better control inputs and auto-aiming.

While I can’t say for sure why you didn’t get picked unless I see your robot, politics between teams is only a minor factor. Teams want to win, and will pick any robot that will get them the points to do so. The only situation where politics matters is defense; a team with a history of good defense will get picked above a robot that scores well and could also play defense. This is one of the few situations where a worse robot will get picked above a better robot. My team has no relationships with other teams, but we still do okay in picking (in the years we built a decent robot.)

My suggestions:
Make a decision if you still want to be on the team with it the way it is. If you want to quit if the team stays like it is, you can either find a new team (I’m not sure how hard this is for the teams in your area, but as a member of a club team that isn’t directly affiliated with a school, I know that there are teams that accept people from any school) or you can try to change the team you are on. And if changing how your team operates fails, you’ll still be able to change teams.
You can try to talk to the mentor directly, but I would probably want to do it with the whole team present, as you mentioned the freshmen becoming convinced that the lead mentor was right. Because of this, you’ll have to be careful to avoid attacking the person. To soften your message, start by thanking them for the time they have spent on FIRST, but then explain that their strategic assesment is wrong. Lots of teams have been able to accurately shoot high, even teams with very little funding or mentors. (I know this because my team got basically no revenue other than the dues this year, but we built a high goal robot that works pretty well within the tarmacs.

Ask him what about the difficult designs makes them too difficult to do, and then either try to put on outreach events to raise funding, recruit more students/mentors, etc. or prove that your team can pull it off by presenting a design. ChiefDelphi is a great resource for this; look into how the openalliance teams made certain designs or make a topic asking how to do it, and I’m sure there will be plenty of help. You will probably have to step into the mechanical side to do this, but the engineering in FIRST can be done simply enough that if you don’t understand it now, you could learn it very quickly. It’s not just about convincing the lead mentor, but also the other students, as you will need their support to convince the lead mentor.

My team used to have a mentor who came up with bad strategic designs and then used his own designs as an example of a bad idea in the strategy talk the next year, blaming the students the previous year for being too ambitious. It sounds like you have a mentor who is the reverse; too unambitious. There’s a fine line between not reaching your potential and forcing yourself into a poorly executed design. The season is a time for implementing and improving what you know will work and integrating it well; the offseason is the time for trying difficult new designs. The mentor is right to not try to do swerve for the first time during the season; there’s a reason good teams like 1678 and 254 took so long to do swerve. But during the offseason, be daring. Try hard things, and improve your abilities to prepare yourself for the next season.

Best of luck with your situation!

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Fair point. But if you normally rank “near dead last around 40th” and this year you ranked 11, I’d still bet you built a better robot than usual, even if it wasn’t quite good enough to get picked/some luck was involved. Since they were a low shooter-high climber, I can also imagine their strategy could have been to maximize rank points over scoring, in which case it almost paid off - they were only three spots away from #8, and how often does the 11th seed not become an alliance captain? We’ll probably never know enough details to judge the design choices, but I can see potential for them being reasonable ones.

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I think my team is actually different from both of those. I think what I’ve found is that they are happy with a robot that can drive and shooter and climb. People were somewhat disappointed that we didn’t get picked, but a lot of people looked like they couldn’t care less. Some people do agree with me and wanted to try harder things but when they ask the mentor to try those things they get shot down and the mentor blames me for wasting peoples time and telling them to do things that we didn’t vote on, which does kinda make sense, but this was like 5-10 people out of a 60 person team.

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Basically we looked through the game manual and made strategies. We then discussed the advantages of each strategy, which was lead by of lead mentor. Every time I tried to bring up high shooter or traversal he would say that no high shooter is going to be able to score balls more accurately than a low shooter and that a traversal climber would be “too hard”.

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Do you think it was him dismissing it, giving his opinion or both. And also did you try to make your case after he said that?

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With that big of a team, you must have some sort of structure in place. Do you have a team mission state and core values? What does your student leadership structure look like? Where do you fit inside of that structure?

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The impression I felt was that he was doing both. I tried to talk about some of the advantages of a high shooter, but I was just told to think our the team and focus on what’ll be best for the team.

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We actually had one of other lead mentors leave this year because of other commitments and lack of time. He had managed a lot of this organization so this year kinda fell apart and we really didn’t have any structure other than basically electrical, mechanical, and programming leads. This is my third year on the team so I have some experience and I do a bit of everything, but mostly stay on programming since we lack a lot of programmers.