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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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30 August 2002 - 12:23 am
At some point tonight or (more likely) tomorrow I need to plug into a phone line and check my Whirlpool email, submit my timesheet, and do other Whirlpool things. I also need to decide how much time I'm going to devote to Whirlpool this semester. It doesn't seem like 333 is going to eat up too much of my time, but I don't have a good feeling about the workload that'll be generated by my classes.
Anyway, Whirlpool has been on my mind a lot recently. I really shouldn't even be worrying about this, but four years of CS brain-washing seems to have done the trick. Anyway, here's the situation I've been thinking about. At Whirlpool they have a lab where they test refrigerators. The lab has 160 test stalls and each test has certain requirements that limit the number of stalls that can be used for the test. Further, each test has a priority (A, B, C) and there are some time-frames attached as well. For those of you who aren't CS people, I've just sketched out a scheduling problem. The lab utilization is not all that high and, as I showed them during the last couple of weeks I was there, considerably lower than they thought it was, so writing a scheduling application that assigns products to specific stalls makes a lot of sense to me. But I'm a computer scientist. The engineer's solution was to develop better tools to help the testers keep better track of which stalls were in use (I wrote the program for that the last week I was at Whirlpool); basically a better way to do what they're already (kind of not) doing.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I just don't like seeing problems with (to me at least) relatively straight-forward solutions that aren't being solved. I think Ron Loui got me started thinking about this when he was telling my 513 class that we needed to look for projects that would "change the way people work for the better." This scheduling problem isn't really in the right scope for 513, but it would definitely change things for the better at Whirlpool.
I guess this kind of illustrates the difference between a computer scientist and someone who can write code. The CS guy has what George Bush called "the vision thing." The coders just write applications that meet the spec they've been given; no real insights into the problem are needed. I'm very glad I'm in the former group, but it can be a bit frustrating at times.
Posted by on 30 August 2002 at 12:23 AM
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