Librarian builds self-checkout machine. Costs $1500 instead of $23000 | Hacker News Reader

Librarian builds self-checkout machine. Costs $1500 instead of $23000

desmoinesregister.com

122 pointsippisl50 comments

"He got it up and running quickly, too. He's a hero around here; talk about job security."

He'll have job security because he sounds like the type of guy who looks for ways to make improvements wherever he's at, which is a trait that a large part of the workforce seems to be missing. I'd hire this guy (and guys like him) and find a place for him in my company (if I had a company) because they look for ways to make things better, faster, cheaper, without it being in their job description.

The spirit of volunteerism and innovation that you admire is impractical when managers define the employee's primary responsibilities in a way that requires unpaid overtime every week.

You're absolutely right, I've even heard of people receiving negative performance reviews because they spent a little unauthorized time at work creating something that improved the productivity of the entire staff by a measurable dollar amount. There will always be companies that shoot themselves in the foot.

He'll have job security because he hacked together a public use kiosk which everyone loves and nobody else can support.

My real point wasn't necessarily that he'll have job security at the library, which of course he will, but that this type of self motivated, driven, and creative person should have little trouble finding work with any company that is able to recognize the worth of those traits.

People generally have little trouble finding a job at any company that values traits that they possess.

While I understand your point there are plenty of places that have more of a "don't rock the boat" mentality. Some of that is dependent on how close or visible your position is to people invested in the company (monetarily or otherwise) vs those who are just trying to make it to the weekend.

If only the average administrator were so forward thinking. Too often they can think no further than the next quarter. Still, there are always consulting fees for him to look forward to.

You said it. I've found it to actually be worse than this. At bigco, his review for that quarter would have read, "trouble with authority, lacks patience, should learn to follow proper channels." That is, of course, if building the thing didn't get him outright fired.

So why not just put it in the job description?

Typical engineer, they just want to solve problems and don't care about making money. Why did he tell them the fixed machine cost? He could have started a nice side business providings these kiosks for $5k or $10k. I know O'Reilly preaches creating more value than you capture but shouldn't he captutre some value?

"shouldn't he captutre some value?"

I think he captured a pile of spiritual value.

I assume you are not joking. He could have done more "good" by investing $1500 of his own money and given them the first one for free. Each one after that is - say - $7500. The library would be thrilled with the free one AND the dramatically lower cost. Say the library from the next town over wants one now, what should he tell them? They know it only costs $1500 and will balk at paying more yet he won't want to build them for free.

There are lots of ways to deploy your talents and other resources, and those of your employer. Some of those ways are subject to your choice, and some are subject to constraints. Maybe he didn't have $1500. He accomplished something for his employer. His employer was happy that it was done cheaply/quickly/at all.

The way budgets and head count works, it may have been easier/possible for his boss to say "use your labor/time to work on this" than to justify a specific purchase of the off the shelf product. They're rockin', right now, rather than still waiting for a budget approval that might not come through.

He works for a library, which is a front line service to the community. I imagine he gets a different personal spiritual/civic ROI doing this for the library than if he worked for Office Depot and did something similar (not that there's anything wrong with that). Direct service to the community just seems more ... service like.

No, I'm not joking.

My wager is that he just isn't in it for the money. I doubt librarians are. I think he would be much more satisfied by helping libraries stay operable.

All things being equal, when given the choice between a 25k system and a 20k system that a business needs - they choose 20k, no matter how much of a markup it is. Value to the customer is still value even at 500% markup.

"The library would be thrilled with the free one AND the dramatically lower cost"

The library would be thrilled with the free one, and tell him his company isn't an approved supplier, sorry, but if he can offer regular maintenance contracts and guarantee spares for the life of the contract, and a service level agreement, and electrical safety certification and accessibility guideline approval then they'd be happy to submit his company to the review board...

Also, he's currently in a job where he can take 15-20 days to tinker with something and people approve of it. In your situation he'd be in a job where he was continually obliged to work on maintenance and support of dozens of hacked together kiosks.

Maybe a software sales model would be a better fit here. You give away the instructions on what hardware they need , and how to connect it ,and then you sell an integrated software that handles this.

This is also makes far easier for the library to try this because you can offer trial period/monthly software subscription , and they could reuse some hardware they have their(pc,display) , to make the initial investment relatively small, so you need a lot less bureaucratic approvals.

And, remember, job security isn't free, and he has an even more secure job now.

He captured great job security value.

I know that a lot of people would think that, but I can tell you from personal experience that that is likely not the case. One offs, impressive or not, rarely, if ever, factor into an administrators budgetary decisions. Killing the goose that laid the golden egg is a quite common occurrence.

You might be right. But in any case , with his name in such a great story in the news , he greatly improved his resume.

From the sound of it, everyone loves him so much it might even help him to get laid!

Because he wants to solve problems, and doesn't care about making money. You say that like it's a bad thing!

$1500 + 15 to 20 days work. However wonderful librarians are, they don't get paid $1000/day, so it's still a good deal. But not quite as good a deal as the headline suggests.

When universities ask us to whip up one of these babies we quote a number much closer to $25k than to $1.5k. One reason is that the fully loaded cost of the cheapest engineer capable of doing this is probably about $10k for a man-month. (I don't know what librarians make in Iowa but if it was less than $8k fully loaded I'm going to be surprised).

Also, after you install it you have to support it, and these are not the easiest customers in the world to deal with. (Not the worst, either, but an intermediate engineer answer the phone and walk you through how to clear a print jam -- not that any of our customers would ever call four times in a year about a print jam, mind you, this is totally hypothetical -- is not the cheapest endeavor in the world.)

It took him 15-20 days of work for one unit. won't it take him much less time for each unit if he would build them in quantity ?

I would think the kiosk needs to be integrated into the library's primary catalog software database. If other libraries use different catalog software, he would need to do integration work for those other types of catalog systems.

The economies of scale would still apply but it's probably more involved than just churning out kiosks.

That's a good point. Maybe you know how many different catalog systems re used commonly in libraries?

There are many (20+ main ones), and they're all horrid dinosaurs.

Do not insult the dinosaurs by comparing them to library management software.

OPAC seems to be quite common in Germany. It works reasonably well (from a library user's point of view).

It takes us X% less time to create the 2nd and subsequent units relative to the first, and we charge Y% less money for them. They are certainly not 60/20 but if you're thinking in that general direction you understand custom software development pretty well.

Unless they make more than one.

But it only cost $1500 extra. His salary is already in the budget. No need to do a fund raiser to pay him. At which point, since that money was going to be spent anyways, the only real cost from his time is the opportunity cost for what else he could have been doing.

If he had stuff he was doing, then someone else had to do it, and therefore there was a cost. Even if this cost was someone going unpaid overtime.

If he is employed to do such work, then his salary should definitely be counted!

Yes, but then you'd probably have to subtract the amount of time that he would have spent implementing the other type of solution or getting training on how to administer it. The salary doesn't necessarily have to be included; it's a fixed cost.

We can also assume that his job in technical support did not use 100% of his time. So some of the costs were already there to begin with.

the only real cost from his time is the opportunity cost for what else he could have been doing

Exactly--and since you're bringing economics into picture, the opportunity cost should exactly equal the wages expended on developing this. OP makes a valid point.

OTOH if the marginal cost of production is really 1/20th of the next-best solution, then his employer should easily be able to recoup that by rolling out a bunch of these.

Exactly--and since you're bringing economics into picture, the opportunity cost should exactly equal the wages expended on developing this. OP makes a valid point.

Not necessarily, if his job includes some degree of "on demand" responsibilities--it said he was a librarian who handles some tech support, so chances are a lot of what he's being paid for is just being there when needed. On a slow day, he'd be there anyway and getting paid the same, so working on something like this is a clear win over, I don't know, dusting shelves or something.

Yeah, HN folks should be well aware of this.

"I can start a startup for the cost of renting a server...that's like $50/mo!"

Oh yeah, there's also the 1000s of hours of your previously free time that also goes in.

He said: "I like to mess around with things like that on my own."

He donated his expertise to the community, and had a good time. I'm having a hard time finding the downside.

Anyone know what software, tools he used? I'm sure other libraries would like to do the same.

The library in Appleton had a decent self-checkout several years ago, and it was ridiculously simple: a fixed barcode scanner, de-magnetizing bar, card swipe, and an off-the-shelf computer + monitor. Likely cost a lot more than $1500, but there's no reason it wouldn't have been fairly cheap, and I've never heard of anyone having trouble with it. It also only took up about 3 square feet of ground space.

Grocery store checkouts need to learn something from that design. Swipe card, slide books through & listen for the beep, and walk away. Some are that simple, but most have you click through several layers of buttons just to frickin' pay.

Wonderful story and it made my day. I really like it when people are fixing problems and go above and beyond their job description.

It's not so much a cost saving, more an indication that this particular librarian is underemployed. With those skills, he shouldn't be stamping books and clearing print jams.

The people you see stamping books are probably clerks or pages. "Librarian" is a professional job that requires at least a master's degree. Librarians these days increasingly have degrees in "information science" which includes a wide variety of technologies from books to the internet.

The librarian in this news story "handles technical support for the library." Apparently this isn't just clearing print jams, either: "I had done some Web-application development for the library..."

My mistake - I must have made a wrongful assumption based on practice in the UK. While public librarians in Britain are also expected to have a postgraduate qualification, that doesn't mean very much here and librarians aren't particularly well paid unless they are heads of service. An experienced librarian would expect to earn about half what an experienced software developer or systems administrator would - indeed, they would be fortunate to earn more than a junior developer on their first year in the job.

As an indication of their status here, a study published by the British Psychological Society in 2006 suggested that librarians are amongst the most stressed and frustrated workers. In the study, librarians themselves described feelings of severe boredom, a lack of control over their careers and insufficient opportunities to exercise their skills. As a heavy library user myself, this news story gelled strongly with the perception I have of librarians - intelligent people with very little to do, shuffling about the place with the demeanour of a lackadaisical hound, looking for something to puncture their tedious routine.

Yeah, maybe it's different here in the U.S. Last month, Librarian ranked #46 in a "Best Jobs" list at the Wall Street Journal - with "stress" as one of the criteria. (Software Engineer was #2!)

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/st_BESTJOBS...

You do make a good distinction between public libraries and others (school libraries, medical/law/corporate libraries). But even there, you might not have the full picture. The people who spend most of their time at the circulation desk in most libraries are not librarians. Meanwhile, librarians may spend most of their time doing jobs you don't see, like collection development (finding, selecting, and acquiring new which books or other resources).

Or, maybe he just likes being a librarian. It's probably a lower stress job than engineering.

I wonder if there's similar opportunities for cost reduction in other self-service kiosks ?

There's a similar opportunity almost everywhere something is sold at a massive premium to material costs.

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