Show HN: Elevators

This article gives me war flashbacks about a particularly irritating OO design interview from 5 years ago.

Oh my god, every time I'm waiting for the elevator, I think of how annoying it must be to be someone who's building the algorithm to make sure that you minimize the amount of wait times between picking up people and taking them to their destination. Then I also wonder if the people who apply the logic and program the logic into the elevators are actually evil sadists that are doing it on purpose to make us wait longer enough and suffer a little extra.

For folks that have never seen elevator scheduling the game: https://play.elevatorsaga.com/ Enjoy this rabbit hole :D

This is a good article. It reminds me of a story.

At a previous employer we had heteregenous elevators. In one bank, some went to the lower half of floors only while others went to all and the company installed a "smart" elevator system. I kind of became known because I was constantly yelling about this system in the feedback group because I hate "smart" elevators and and (IMHO) they just don't work. What actually works is express elevators and sky lobbies.

This article covers one of the deficiencies this system had: full elevators. For example, you'd want to go down and an elevator would skip your floor because another had already been assigned. That one would show up full and you couldn't go down. Down wasn't so bad because the stairs weren't a bad option but up was terrible. Going up a few floors was fine. Going up 20 was... a bigger issue.

Back in the day we had elevator operators and people in the lobby during the morning rush who would shepherd people into particular elevators. I actually think this system works way better than anything technology has come up with. Even if you nail the implementation (and I've never experienced elevators that have), people don't read and will just get into elevators anyway.

Anyway the article says that generally speaking on smaller banks simple up and down buttons work best. I absolutely agree.

There's a deeper issue here though and that is solutions looking for a problem. Nobody is making money from up and down buttons. They are fromn selling smart elevator solutions. And you see this everywhere in life. It basically devolves into rent-seeking behavior. Salespeople wine and dine a couple of people responsible for making decisions and then make bank on selling something nobody wants or needs as well as the constant maintenance and updates.

Makes me want to play Sim Tower again.

There’s something so satisfying about watching a machine just dutifully work through queued tasks like this.