Ask HN: Do You Have an On-Call Schedule Calculator? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do You Have an On-Call Schedule Calculator?

2 pointsdzink5 comments

Tapping the collective brain, to avoid writing custom software for this: have you ever encountered an on-call schedule calculator of sorts: you plug in 20 people’s requested days, scheduling restrictions, and requested days off and it spits out possible schedules that satisfy everyone (or show conflicts if there is no perfect permutation)? Some sub-set variation of the above functionality would help as well - ex: api that does the above sans visuals, or a version that lets people enter schedules to reconcile them instead of one user, etc .

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This sounds like an exact cover problem.

Optimimum solutions to exact cover problems are non-polynomial (NP). There's also a human problem. No on-call schedule will make people happy because on-call is unpleasant. The best on-call schedule for you is for me to do all the on-call. Or two human problems: the manager's job prioritizes covering on-call over happiness...and uses on-call instead of hiring night/weekend staff so nobody does on-call. Roughly speaking, one person on call for nights, weekends, and holidays can be replaced by three FTE's. That's only a 15% staff increase in a twenty person organization.

This is for medical shift workers who are paid per shift so they declare how many shifts they want - 2 or 3 per month. All shifts are the same.

If it's good work and all shifts are the same, hiring FTE's should be easy. And of similar cost assuming the on-call shifts pay the regular wage.

These are FTEs. Hospitals need 24/7/365 coverage for certain roles and no single person can cover that much, thus shift work is required. Do you have suggestions for software that can help them distribute the available shifts between each-other?

This is for a group of equal medical workers sharing a paid per-call pool, each requesting a number of calls per month. It’s about calculating the permutation that leaves as many people happy as possible and potentially assigning a point system so those less happy can get higher priority choices next month.

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