Visitor requirements in home division

[Ben Stevenson]

One thing i noticed, was in the old visitor policy it had a bit on visiting controllers about;

1. A controller shall perform the more than half of their controlling in their home Division

But i can't see anything similar in the new GCAP.  Has this been done away with? 

[Matthew Bartels]

Yes. It’s not something that was really enforceable and the question that needs to be answered in support of it is what does it matter if I controlled more in my visiting facility one month than I did my home facility? If it’s consistent then that’s something a discussion should be had about concerning whether or not the member should consider a transfer.

[Thimo Koolen]

Maybe that's true Matthew, but if it's not in the policy, then we're not allowed to do anything about it, as has been said in different places.

Something that mentions that approximately at least half of the controller hours during a 6 month period should be held in your home division kinda makes sense and also takes note of the issue that one month you might control more in one VACC than the other.

[Matthew Bartels]

It’s sort of implied in the definitions of home vs visitor controller. A home controller is a place where a controller conducts the majority of their controlling sessions.

[Alexandra Robison]

13 minutes ago, Matthew Bartels said:

It’s sort of implied in the definitions of home vs visitor controller. A home controller is a place where a controller conducts the majority of their controlling sessions.

Writing policy by implication is the wrong idea. If you want something to be in policy, write it down. Gray area has no room here.

[Thimo Koolen]

Just now, Alexandra Robison said:

Writing policy by implication is the wrong idea. If you want something to be in policy, write it down. Gray area has no room here.

Especially since on other matters it's all been "there's no room for interpretation/other rules outside of this policy". It should really be consistent.

[Matthew Wurzbach]

11 hours ago, Matthew Bartels said:

It’s sort of implied in the definitions of home vs visitor controller.

If the GCAP was written with this sort of mentality, it makes much more sense why it fails from policy and technical writing standpoints.

[Andrew Kim]

12 hours ago, Matthew Bartels said:

It’s sort of implied in the definitions of home vs visitor controller. A home controller is a place where a controller conducts the majority of their controlling sessions.

IMO relying on implications does absolutely nothing to enforce the “implication”. Should the 50% policy be officially abolished, there is absolutely nothing stopping me from spending all my time at another facility while technically being a home controller just to do a training session every three months. I.e., just because there is an implication, does not mean anyone has to follow it.

[Andre Almeida]

Having given this a bit of thought, I believe the 50% rule must return, in a clear and direct way, unless the sub-divisions get the power to remove someone from being a home controller.

As it stands right now, what is stopping someone from doing all their training in sub-division A, but doing all their controlling in sub-division B?

Imagine sub-division B is the place at which someone really wants to control. But their training queues are long, extending into many months. A person would be visiting country A, doing all their training there, as it is really fast with virtually no queue, quickly getting their S3, and applying for a visitor endorsement at sub-division B. Once they eventually begin doing their C1 training, what is prohibiting them from only controlling at sub-division A for the training sessions, not controlling there at all with the S3 rating, whilst putting in countless hours in sub-division B, the place they wanted to control at in the first place? 

Sub-division A, as it is spending their resources training this person, should be entitled to having at least half their controlling time be with them. If not we'll see even more rating tourism then we are seeing today, with sub-divisions training people who will never control.

[Liesel Downes]

I think it is a complete waste of time to enforce a 50/50 rule like this and really it should be up to the controller how they make use of their time. 

[Ben Stevenson]

20 hours ago, Matthew Bartels said:

Yes. It’s not something that was really enforceable and the question that needs to be answered in support of it is what does it matter if I controlled more in my visiting facility one month than I did my home facility? If it’s consistent then that’s something a discussion should be had about concerning whether or not the member should consider a transfer.

What about going the other way?  I've seen controllers who transfer OUT of a facility, get their visiting status at the facility they just left, then still spend a majority of time controlling there instead of where they transferred to.  I don't know why you would want to spend all your time in a facility you don't want to be part of but, I have seen this case, on more than one occasion.

[Karl Mathias Moberg]

19 hours ago, Matthew Bartels said:

It’s sort of implied in the definitions of home vs visitor controller. A home controller is a place where a controller conducts the majority of their controlling sessions.

What? So in this case we're supposed to imply the definition, yet in the rest of the policy, there is little or absolutely no room for implication? You can't have it both ways. 

[Matthew Bartels]

Why does this really matter so much? Your home facility in my opinion is where your community home is. That's where most of your friends are, it's the airspace you know the best. It should be natural that you would control more in your home facility than a place you visit.  If you don't fit in there, then you're likely transferring somewhere else. Not doing the bare minimum and contributing all of your hours to a visiting facility.

I do not think that a strict 50/50 needs to be enforced here. We could look at language that could suggest a transfer if a user is obviously controlling more somewhere else.

What does this look like?

[Rob Nabieszko]

It matters because your home facility is not just where you live, but where you TRAIN. Your home facility invests dozens and dozens of man-hours in training you. You should be required to return that investment in kind.

Yes, most people do treat it that way, but training is such a limited resource. If I spend my time teaching someone, I would like our subdivision to benefit. Yes, go visit elsewhere and learn, but don't forget who taught you most of what you learned about controlling. I always thought the 50/50 rule was perfectly fair and reasonable. If you want to spend more time controlling elsewhere, transfer there.

[Andre Almeida]

6 minutes ago, Rob Nabieszko said:

It matters because your home facility is not just where you live, but where you TRAIN. Your home facility invests dozens and dozens of man-hours in training you. You should be required to return that investment in kind.

This exactly. I don't care if someone's home facility is Portugal, New York, or Mozambique. But the home facility is the one training the controllers, and there should be a guaranteed return of investment. Otherwise why bother training that controller, and not someone else? 

That's why I suggested above that either the 50% rule should stay, or a sub-division should be allowed to forcibly transfer someone to another division. If one of our members would much rather control elsewhere, they may as well make that their home division and get training from them.

[Rob Nabieszko]

19 minutes ago, Rob Nabieszko said:

It matters because your home facility is not just where you live, but where you TRAIN. Your home facility invests dozens and dozens of man-hours in training you. You should be required to return that investment in kind.

Yes, most people do treat it that way, but training is such a limited resource. If I spend my time teaching someone, I would like our subdivision to benefit. Yes, go visit elsewhere and learn, but don't forget who taught you most of what you learned about controlling. I always thought the 50/50 rule was perfectly fair and reasonable. If you want to spend more time controlling elsewhere, transfer there.

We have had problems with popular waitlisted subdivisions. Student X chooses a quieter subdivision, bypasses the waitlist, finishes their S3, and then guest controls the busy subdivision and is never heard from again in the "home" subdivision that actually spent time training them.

Edited July 22, 2021 at 04:35 PM by Rob Nabieszko

[Ryan Parry]

I think trading the 50/50 rule for limiting them to only 3 facilities is a good trade. I do think the language should be adjusted to allow for Division staff to address people consistently controlling more at a visiting facility than their home facility. Is there anything preventing a Division from having a 50/50 rule for their sub-divisions? 

[Graham Drabble]

1 hour ago, Rob Nabieszko said:

It matters because your home facility is not just where you live, but where you TRAIN. Your home facility invests dozens and dozens of man-hours in training you. You should be required to return that investment in kind.

Yes, most people do treat it that way, but training is such a limited resource. If I spend my time teaching someone, I would like our subdivision to benefit. Yes, go visit elsewhere and learn, but don't forget who taught you most of what you learned about controlling. I always thought the 50/50 rule was perfectly fair and reasonable. If you want to spend more time controlling elsewhere, transfer there.

Again I disagree here. Regions exist to administer things on behalf of Vatsim globally. If someone on Vatsim provides the training and then the controller uses that training somewhere on Vatsim then Vatsim wins. It's not a competition between divisions. A lot of the arguments I'm seeing around transferring seems to come from people having a fairly parochial view of the world and looking at how it affects "their" division rather than what it does elsewhere.

We have many, many places with long waiting lists. We have many places with very short waiting lists. We need more controllers on the network and should be trying to use all our resources to make that happen. We don't necessarily need the controllers to control just where they were trained.

[1341101]

1 hour ago, Matthew Bartels said:

in my opinion... It should be natural...

I'm kind of 50/50 on this matter overall (no pun intended 😛 ) so I don't have much of an opinion on this matter.

But just for the purpose of the conversation, you'll be amazed that a lot of people do stay in their current sub-divisions but still intend to control 99% of their time outside of their local vACC. This can be for many reasons, but an example I can think of, can be the S1s, S2s and S3s (or with the new policy just S3s) who only go to those vACCs to get their rating. Whilst you, and most people do realise that they should go where you would fit in the best with the community and etc., a lot of other people still do control more outside than inside. But I think that overall, people controlling more outside their local division is a rare occurrence and I half-agree that there's little point in trying to enforce that. 

[Matthew Bartels]

I agree with @Graham Drabble on the overall thought. The issue though is that most of our training is done by the sub-divisions and their instructors who are investing their time to make not just VATSIM, but their sub-division a better place. The return on their time investment is seeing that controller controlling that airspace.  So I do understand the unwillingness to want a person to use you for training then just go somewhere else.

There is a middle ground here, I just don't think we've found it yet.

At the end of the day, unfortunately, those training resources are going to be lost if a person who doesn't want to control there no matter what. It doesn't matter if thy spends all of their time in his visiting facility or flat transfers out.  We tried to give some protections here with the transfer policies requiring an control hours requirement. So trying to enforce a 50/50 split ends in one of two negative ways. The controller stops controlling because of what the policy dictates for violation. Or the controller transfers out to where they really want to be. In both cases the training facility loses.

[Andre Almeida]

I understand the reasoning behind it, however I don't see it the same exact way.

I completely agree when you say the facility loses when a member stops wanting to control, or if they transfer out. However, they also lose if they spend hours training someone only for that someone to do most of their controlling elsewhere. Okay, it may be good for the network overall (as Graham mentions), but it does little for the sub-division that trained a specific controller in lieu of another who might be willing to control at their home division.

I believe the currently existing 50% rule is a fair enough middle ground. It allows people to control elsewhere if they so desire, but it also ensures that a sub-division gets some return on their time invested training someone. 

Exemptions could perhaps be made so that time spent on a CAOC or Oceanic facility doesn't count towards these 50%, but I think it wouldn't be fair if someone were to do their entire training in sub-division A only to do all their controlling in sub-division B. It would neither be fair to the instructor, nor to the person wanting to control in sub-division A but having to wait in queue after the one training to control elsewhere.

 

[Ben Stevenson]

4 minutes ago, Andre Almeida said:

it also ensures that a sub-division gets some return on their time invested training someone. 

 

This right here.  It takes months, sometimes even a year or more to get someone trained up from S1 to C1.  Then that person gets visiting status somewhere else and spends all their time there, it's kind of  ... insulting?  annoying?  upsetting? not sure on the exact word/feeling, but it's a bit of a slap in the face to the instructing staff spent all that time training them to work our airspace, just for them to up and go work somewhere else, while doing the bare minimum to remain active in our sector.

 

I don't think it's asking much that they control at least half their time in the sub-division they chose to be a part of.

 

And i agree that Oceanic/COAC could be considered an exemption.

[Rob Nabieszko]

1 hour ago, Graham Drabble said:

If someone on Vatsim provides the training and then the controller uses that training somewhere on Vatsim then Vatsim wins. It's not a competition between divisions. A lot of the arguments I'm seeing around transferring seems to come from people having a fairly parochial view of the world and looking at how it affects "their" division rather than what it does elsewhere.

We have many, many places with long waiting lists. We have many places with very short waiting lists. We need more controllers on the network and should be trying to use all our resources to make that happen. We don't necessarily need the controllers to control just where they were trained.

A little healthy competition between divisions is not a bad thing. I don't want the rest of the network to fail. But I do enjoy trying to push my division hard to be the best, and competition is a great motivator. (Not to the point of sabotaging anyone else - just do our best.)

So if it doesn't matter where we control, then why have divisions at all? I just believe that the Home Division should be more than just an administrative checkbox.

[Matthew Bartels]

What’s the difference between a controller you spent a year training who spends the majority of his time in a visiting facility and a controller you spent a year training who transfers out at their first opportunity? I think the slap in the face stings the same just comes from a different hand? In both cases the training facility loses.

[Rob Nabieszko]

You included a consolidation period for transfers of 200 hours (9.01e). So you acknowledge that people should control their home division prior to leaving.

I would like to plug the hole where you get trained in location X, but then visit location Y forever and never control X again. Forever a visitor in Y. Never complete the 200 hours in X.