Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

Re:Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles by CydeWeys on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @10:25PM (#21199401)

It's literally the bin packing problem, which is NP-complete. Plus you have another axis entirely on top of the already NP-hard problem: You want to minimize the number of times that you move any given group of people over time as you re-configure the office space to fit the maximum number of groups into it.

This is an algorithmically hard problem, and I'm not surprised that there might be significant benefits to investing in solving it very well.

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Re:Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles by oh_sigh on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @11:13PM (#21199658)

Can you give me an order of magnitude estimate of how many milliseconds you believe solving the 2d bin packing problem with added constraints would take on a commodity PC when n=the max number of clients in any wework building?

The problem is interesting, but it isn't one you need to set up an entire engineering team to solve.

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Re:Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles by CydeWeys on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @01:21PM (#21205425)

Actually, yes, I think you would need an entire engineering team to write, maintain, scale, and run a system that solves this problem. For example, my employer has a whole team working on internal tools for booking/managing/re-allocating conference rooms. It's almost exactly the same problem, it's non-trivial, it's complex, and it takes an entire team.

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