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Comment by cosmodisk | Hacker News Reader

One of the senior teachers in my school used to organise schedule for 1000 pupils and 50+ teachers. With some minor things everything worked pretty damn well.Then they decided to get some software to do the same.Never ended up working...

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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 time... so much mess.

Especially when scheduling other humans... the humans being scheduled can smell a computer scheduling a mile away and IMO they expect the worst at that point. They're not necessarily wrong.

> their ability to handle a lot of variable data and inputs and weigh them dynamically

I dunno. Computers are pretty good at this one too, on different kinds of variance and weights.

The largest problem I see is that everyone is discussing "either or" on this thread, while the clear winner is both.

I think ultimately if you're working with humans the question is if you want the schedule to solve a sort of math problem for you ... or if you want folks to be happy.

They are very much not the same thing and the dynamic nature of keeping people happy and filling a schedule is extremely difficult to account for with software.

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 operating off of.

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

Computers solve the legible problems. But scheduling is one where the problems lack in hard specification, and plans involve several "layers" of prioritization, so what's called for is approximate results that avoid failure modes, which is something a skilled human does pretty well.

I do think that software speeds up some parts of the process, but like so many automated processes, it's computer assistance, not computer intelligence.

I was reading some old literature a few months ago on this related to police staffing where union issues had to be taken into account. It seems adding social penalties is a way to do this algorithmically

You’re giving me flashbacks to some software I worked on a while ago that had to use rules from three different collective agreements from nursing unions. Turns out writing business logic for rules that aren’t internally consistent is a challenge, and unlike most LOB projects I’ve worked on, the procedure can not be amended until the next round of bargaining.

I suspect that the big thing there is negotiation and social skills. It is not just about making schedule, it is also about talking with people, making them compromise, making them happy despite not gaining everything they wanted, explaining them that what they wanted they wont like actually, making them understand others too.

This is a good point on social aspect: no software can go to a couple of teachers and say: look, there's an overlap and we've only got one classroom,how about you do x,y,z and then next time you get x,y,z.

Well, not yet.

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 the full scheduling requirements for all scans, some medicare rules that influence scheduling, and how to handle all the various problems, takes a long time. They live in terror of having front desk staff leave, because a quick replacement is impossible.

Hopefully pay is commensurate with responsibility.

What sort of software?

You could try http://jeffreykingston.id.au/khe/ which is free.

You can try it online at http://jeffreykingston.id.au/cgi-bin/hseval.cgi

It was one of the hardest things i wrote, making a schedule for students, teachers and the classes. Worked like a dream, written in pascal. They used it for years.

Huh, so did I. In Pascal.

It is still the most intricate software I’ve ever written in my 25 years of software dev, and I wrote it in high school.

I remember struggling with running out of RAM on the 4 megabyte school PCs.

It may also be the software started enforcing things like limited overtime and back-to-back shifts that humans were otherwise fine scheduling.

As a problem, classroom scheduling is very interesting. The kids and the teachers were well aware of challenges anyone doing the scheduling hadv and very much doubt any software at the time could handle non standard situations. Interestingly enough,just last year I was trying to find off the shelve software that could do scheduling and have a calendar feature for one our suppliers. After considering 10 or so options I ended up with a conclusion that unless someone would do custom solution, they'd have to continue using Excel for it.

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