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Employee Scheduling

developers.google.com

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131–137 of 137 posts

Re: Employee Scheduling

#131

Post by pnutjam »

nitwit005 wrote: post #107
duxup wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans might be kinda slow and expensive, but their ability to handle a lot of variable data and inputs and weigh them dynamically, filter out absurd results before applying them, and etc is pretty amazing. Like if someone comes to me and says "what if we... did X with the schedule". I could tell them how to do that and not to right away. The code would have to be changed / rewritten and tested and fail at it each ti…

Assuming you can get someone highly competent to do scheduling, which isn't all that likely. More likely you'll get someone who both produces mediocre results, and favors their friends. Even if you can get competence, you may want to automate it anyways. I'm currently working in health, and I recently visited a radiology center that claimed it took a full year to get front desk staff fully up to speed. Understanding…

Hopefully pay is commensurate with responsibility.

Re: Employee Scheduling

#132

Post by heinrichf »

philip1209 wrote: post #127
heinrichf wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See also the story of Staffjoy mentioned in another comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22583653 ) YC fellowship, they couldn't find a market, and shut down: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=staffjoy

Yup. Small businesses don't need auto-scheduling. Enterprises already have functional tools that are hard to displace (particularly due to internationalization, localization, and payroll needs). Mid-size businesses often need the customized deployments of enterprises, but don't have the budget.

By the way, thanks a lot for sharing your story and code back then, I learnt a lot from it.

Re: Employee Scheduling

#133

Post by cosmodisk »

bumby wrote: post #130
dwaltrip wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are far worse at it than humans. This is the difference between narrow AI and general AI. Humans can do millions of different complex tasks, and can adapt when the situation changes. Computers are terrible at updating their models automatically based on new information, as they don't have understanding of the bigger context. Worse still, software today has no way of analyzing and adjusting the assumptions it is…

People are (currently) better than computers at updating their models but I don’t think we’re particularly great at it. Look at how many business run on the “this is how we’ve always done it” model

This isn't because we are bad at it but rather because of politics and some being idiots.

Re: Employee Scheduling

#134

Post by bumby »

cosmodisk wrote: post #133
bumby wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are (currently) better than computers at updating their models but I don’t think we’re particularly great at it. Look at how many business run on the “this is how we’ve always done it” model

This isn't because we are bad at it but rather because of politics and some being idiots.

I tend to disagree. There’s all kinds of cognitive biases that show we’re bad at updating our mental models

Re: Employee Scheduling

#135

Post by 7thaccount »

radomir_cernoch wrote: post #4
saagarjha wrote: post #2

I’m a bit uncertain about what Google OR-Tools is…it seems to be some sort of framework for solving optimization problems, but based on the example here I am curious how general such a tool can be, as normally I find that a “drop in” algorithms framework is generally quite difficult to make or use. Is anyone using this for something useful? Does it perform faster than a hand-rolled implementation tailored to the prob…

Exactly my thinking. I work in a company that deals exclusively with OR. This means that we might be overly specialized for this product. I see OR-Tools as an educational product. The tool is easy to start tinkering with and it has superb documentation - even for people not specialized in combinatorial optimization.

Can you link to your company. I've always thought it would be cool to 100% work on LP, MIP, and Nonlinear models. Do y'all use CPLEX/GUROBI for the big stuff and Prolog for more discreet items?

Re: Employee Scheduling

#136

Post by hakank »

cerved wrote: post #124
IndexPointer wrote: post #116

Well now I want to spend a few hours using it to solve the peaceable queens problem: https://youtu.be/IN1fPtY9jYg

Sounds similar to n-Queens, check out http://www.hakank.org/google_or_tools/nqueens.py http://www.hakank.org/google_or_tools/nqueens2.py http://www.hakank.org/google_or_tools/nqueens3.py for inspiration

Actually, the Peaceable Army (or Armies) of Queens problem is a separate problem and much harder than the n-queens problem. Here is a MiniZinc model: http://hakank.org/minizinc/peaceableArmyOfQueens.mzn , and a Picat model: http://hakank.org/picat/peaceableArmyOfQueens.pi

(Also: Thanks for your links to my site.)

Re: Employee Scheduling

#137

Post by hipjiveguy »

dzink wrote: post #77

We had to find a solution for doctors to manage 22 different peers distributing 30 shifts a month. The schedule had to abide by each employees vacation requests and distributed undesirable shifts like weekends and holidays in some equitable manner, and be easily interpreted by staff. The solution was an excel spreadsheet with a lot of auto-fill logic and formulas to show shift and burden counts for each doctor so the…

Since it's a spreadsheet, is there any way you can share it? I assume the Dr's names could be easily changed so it's generic?
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