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Apparently, I was missed and I was mentioned and so I was invited to go with T. to martial arts and Vic’s. So much fun chatting with D. and G.! Lovely to eat at a diner again.
Piano lesson went well; next one will be in July, because of various travel plans on the part of the instructor and also us.
I got to thinking about employee scheduling apps (no one really cares why, even me). There is no journalism in mainstream sources about them. Which is really fucking bizarre! I googled, I searched news.google.com specifically. I went to WSJ and Bloomberg and used their internal searches. I can find blogs and websites dedicated to small businesses, payments, etc., that talk about this stuff, other than that, crickets. I do understand that these things are primarily used in “low-skill”, low-wage, high-turnover sectors such as retail, hospitality, security and construction. I put “low-skill” in quotes because a lot of this stuff is actually quite skilled, but they are devalued skills that are gendered female or highly associated with recent immigrants or whatever.
Also! There is a wikipedia entry. It appears to be largely unaware of what I’m on about here, in terms of gig economy style apps and scheduling entering the trad low-wage, high-turnover sectors of our economy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_scheduling_software
If you have no idea what I’m talking about (maybe that wikipedia article helped you, I dunno! But: storytime, anyway!), I’ll try to sketch it out in a way that might help it make sense to you. Once Upon a Time, when I worked at a movie theater in the mid-1980s, the manager put together a schedule of who would work which shifts at which position. So, Saturday from open to 6 pm in concessions, or Sunday from 6 pm to close in box or whatever. It was posted on a piece of paper and we’d all crowd around it and someone would say, oh, fuckity, I wanted to go to a party on that Tuesday and then we’d start dickering about swapping shifts. For some people, we could literally just take a pencil, erase one name and put another in (if we’d been doing this for a while, and we’d worked the positions in question etc.) but if you were new, or you’d gotten caught unilaterally moving people around on the schedule without _telling_ them and so a shift wasn’t worked because someone didn’t know they’d been put on the schedule, then you were not supposed to. Informal, and had the potential to generate some real disaster.
It was not uncommon in a variety of contexts to schedule shifts this way and to let employees agree to swap shifts. Some places have policies designed to mitigate chaos in exchange for more labor on everyone. It was usually possible at a lot of these places to NOT be scheduled for some period of time, altho if you did that for very long, and then you wanted to be scheduled again, you’d be getting shitty shifts for a while before you got back in the good graces / higher up in the priority queue in terms of getting the shifts you preferred.
Many people working this kind of job worked more than one of these jobs. I worked some combination of Woolworth’s (retail), Denny’s (restaurant) and movie theatre for a couple years, and then later switched over to temp office work. When I felt I was not getting enough work at Kelly’s Services, I added more agencies (Volt, and maybe Adam’s? Details are foggy at this point) until I had as much work as I wanted.
Depending on your perspective, the gig economy took off / came into mass existence in the wake of the Great Recession. People didn’t have jobs, but they did have smart phones, and apps connected people who wanted work with people who wanted a bit of work done. Despite decades of development of complex scheduling that occurred in the gig economy (Uber/Lyft, Instacart, TaskRabbit, etc.), a lot of “traditional” employment either kept doing the schedule on paper, or was mired in a PC and printout version of basically the same process.
No more! Apps and cloud computing are now doing for “traditional” employment what was happening over in the gig economy. I have some questions, tho!
First, when did this process start?
Second, how much consolidation has already happened (not much, so far?)
Third, what kind of consolidation is happening?
I have a little bit of an answer on the third question: Toast Bought Sling last summer, to surprisingly little fanfare, and Toast also provides onboarding software and payroll. Toast is highly restaurant specific, but does a lot to support takeout, counter service and table service — that’s how I first noticed them over the last few years. Everywhere I went had switched to Toast. Partly that is because they got started in my area. I absolutely failed to notice their IPO. Sling is a scheduling app that is (was?) not restaurant specific.
R. wondered about payroll. Toast also seems to do payroll. I’m sitting over here thinking, wait, there’s a company in my area, that has gone public, that I know about as a customer of businesses which use it (and have zero issues with), that has tentacles out to onboarding, scheduling and payrolling employees, and doing payments from customers … and that I hadn’t entertained as something to invest in largely because I hadn’t seen anything about it in any of the excessive amount of news I consume. I’ve apparently completely fallen asleep over here. That should be fixed. Maybe I’ll go find a podcast about all this.
I looked at some of the other companies in the employee scheduling space. Some of them do employee scheduling as an aspect of project management software, or costing. Others seem to have wound up in employee scheduling as part of a CRM-space suite of software. It’s kind of interesting to just think about _where does staff scheduling belong anyway_ and also, why didn’t I see the phrase “human resources” even once in this particular dive.
Toast is international. I know this because I was trying to answer a question about what their stack is, and found this:
https://careers.toasttab.com/jobs/f426dfa0-8438-499b-a1e4-4236792c3925#
If you have any sense at all, you will stop reading here. Everything below this is me noodling around with the tech stack description from the job posting and trying to work out what all the words mean. Some of the words I know. Some I had to look up.
Our Tech Stack
“Toast’s products run on a stack that ranges from guest and restaurant-facing Android tablets to backend services in Java to internal, guest-facing and restaurant-facing web apps. Our backend services follow a microservice architecture written using Java 8 and DropWizard; we use AWS extensively, ranging from S3 to RDS to Lambda. We have our own platform for dealing with user management, service elevations and robust load balancing. Toast stores data in a set of sharded Postgres databases and utilizes Apache Spark for large scale data workloads including query and batch processing. The front-end is built primarily using React and ES6. The main Toast POS application is an Android application written in Java and Kotlin. For data between tablets and our cloud platform we operate RabbitMQ clusters as well as direct tablet communication to the back end.”
R. had remarked that he was betting Toast doesn’t use Oracle. LOL. Nope. RDS on AWS. I had to look up what “sharded” meant, and it was exactly what I guessed it must mean, and which I had already figured out had to be happening on more or less every massive cloud based service, but if you would like to read details, this is what I read:
https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/database-sharding/
I also had to look up Apache Spark, even tho it was apparent what it had to be — it’s what people used Hadoop for, before Apache Spark existed. Apparently, they rolled machine learning into the Hadoop equivalent which, yeah, that’d definitely be a killer feature to have handy.
DropWizard is a layer of libraries. ES6 is which Javascript they are using. React is an open-source library/framework for developing UI that was created and is maintained by Meta (that would be FB to everyone who is struggling to keep up).
Honestly, I have no idea why I’d never heard of Kotlin before. It’s a computer language that is designed to run on the Java virtual machine with Java libraries and is interoperable with Java, but has some nice-to-have things like OO and static type checking. It is at moments like this that I have to tell myself, firmly, NO, walkitout. You are NOT going to go just take a quick look and see what is going on over there because it might be kind of interesting. NO. However, I might ask R. Apparently google uses Kotlin for android app development.
ETA: R. had not heard of Kotlin, but had heard of the tools shop that developed it and did not have any particular negative association with them.
Are you still here? Why?
I like their stack. It is flexible and powerful and leverages well-established (not bleeding edge), current, competitive-in-class components, without being overly wedded to a particular universe. If I were looking for a job coding or doing architecture, _which I absolutely am not_, I’d be very attracted to this company.
Piano lesson went well; next one will be in July, because of various travel plans on the part of the instructor and also us.
I got to thinking about employee scheduling apps (no one really cares why, even me). There is no journalism in mainstream sources about them. Which is really fucking bizarre! I googled, I searched news.google.com specifically. I went to WSJ and Bloomberg and used their internal searches. I can find blogs and websites dedicated to small businesses, payments, etc., that talk about this stuff, other than that, crickets. I do understand that these things are primarily used in “low-skill”, low-wage, high-turnover sectors such as retail, hospitality, security and construction. I put “low-skill” in quotes because a lot of this stuff is actually quite skilled, but they are devalued skills that are gendered female or highly associated with recent immigrants or whatever.
Also! There is a wikipedia entry. It appears to be largely unaware of what I’m on about here, in terms of gig economy style apps and scheduling entering the trad low-wage, high-turnover sectors of our economy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_scheduling_software
If you have no idea what I’m talking about (maybe that wikipedia article helped you, I dunno! But: storytime, anyway!), I’ll try to sketch it out in a way that might help it make sense to you. Once Upon a Time, when I worked at a movie theater in the mid-1980s, the manager put together a schedule of who would work which shifts at which position. So, Saturday from open to 6 pm in concessions, or Sunday from 6 pm to close in box or whatever. It was posted on a piece of paper and we’d all crowd around it and someone would say, oh, fuckity, I wanted to go to a party on that Tuesday and then we’d start dickering about swapping shifts. For some people, we could literally just take a pencil, erase one name and put another in (if we’d been doing this for a while, and we’d worked the positions in question etc.) but if you were new, or you’d gotten caught unilaterally moving people around on the schedule without _telling_ them and so a shift wasn’t worked because someone didn’t know they’d been put on the schedule, then you were not supposed to. Informal, and had the potential to generate some real disaster.
It was not uncommon in a variety of contexts to schedule shifts this way and to let employees agree to swap shifts. Some places have policies designed to mitigate chaos in exchange for more labor on everyone. It was usually possible at a lot of these places to NOT be scheduled for some period of time, altho if you did that for very long, and then you wanted to be scheduled again, you’d be getting shitty shifts for a while before you got back in the good graces / higher up in the priority queue in terms of getting the shifts you preferred.
Many people working this kind of job worked more than one of these jobs. I worked some combination of Woolworth’s (retail), Denny’s (restaurant) and movie theatre for a couple years, and then later switched over to temp office work. When I felt I was not getting enough work at Kelly’s Services, I added more agencies (Volt, and maybe Adam’s? Details are foggy at this point) until I had as much work as I wanted.
Depending on your perspective, the gig economy took off / came into mass existence in the wake of the Great Recession. People didn’t have jobs, but they did have smart phones, and apps connected people who wanted work with people who wanted a bit of work done. Despite decades of development of complex scheduling that occurred in the gig economy (Uber/Lyft, Instacart, TaskRabbit, etc.), a lot of “traditional” employment either kept doing the schedule on paper, or was mired in a PC and printout version of basically the same process.
No more! Apps and cloud computing are now doing for “traditional” employment what was happening over in the gig economy. I have some questions, tho!
First, when did this process start?
Second, how much consolidation has already happened (not much, so far?)
Third, what kind of consolidation is happening?
I have a little bit of an answer on the third question: Toast Bought Sling last summer, to surprisingly little fanfare, and Toast also provides onboarding software and payroll. Toast is highly restaurant specific, but does a lot to support takeout, counter service and table service — that’s how I first noticed them over the last few years. Everywhere I went had switched to Toast. Partly that is because they got started in my area. I absolutely failed to notice their IPO. Sling is a scheduling app that is (was?) not restaurant specific.
R. wondered about payroll. Toast also seems to do payroll. I’m sitting over here thinking, wait, there’s a company in my area, that has gone public, that I know about as a customer of businesses which use it (and have zero issues with), that has tentacles out to onboarding, scheduling and payrolling employees, and doing payments from customers … and that I hadn’t entertained as something to invest in largely because I hadn’t seen anything about it in any of the excessive amount of news I consume. I’ve apparently completely fallen asleep over here. That should be fixed. Maybe I’ll go find a podcast about all this.
I looked at some of the other companies in the employee scheduling space. Some of them do employee scheduling as an aspect of project management software, or costing. Others seem to have wound up in employee scheduling as part of a CRM-space suite of software. It’s kind of interesting to just think about _where does staff scheduling belong anyway_ and also, why didn’t I see the phrase “human resources” even once in this particular dive.
Toast is international. I know this because I was trying to answer a question about what their stack is, and found this:
https://careers.toasttab.com/jobs/f426dfa0-8438-499b-a1e4-4236792c3925#
If you have any sense at all, you will stop reading here. Everything below this is me noodling around with the tech stack description from the job posting and trying to work out what all the words mean. Some of the words I know. Some I had to look up.
Our Tech Stack
“Toast’s products run on a stack that ranges from guest and restaurant-facing Android tablets to backend services in Java to internal, guest-facing and restaurant-facing web apps. Our backend services follow a microservice architecture written using Java 8 and DropWizard; we use AWS extensively, ranging from S3 to RDS to Lambda. We have our own platform for dealing with user management, service elevations and robust load balancing. Toast stores data in a set of sharded Postgres databases and utilizes Apache Spark for large scale data workloads including query and batch processing. The front-end is built primarily using React and ES6. The main Toast POS application is an Android application written in Java and Kotlin. For data between tablets and our cloud platform we operate RabbitMQ clusters as well as direct tablet communication to the back end.”
R. had remarked that he was betting Toast doesn’t use Oracle. LOL. Nope. RDS on AWS. I had to look up what “sharded” meant, and it was exactly what I guessed it must mean, and which I had already figured out had to be happening on more or less every massive cloud based service, but if you would like to read details, this is what I read:
https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/database-sharding/
I also had to look up Apache Spark, even tho it was apparent what it had to be — it’s what people used Hadoop for, before Apache Spark existed. Apparently, they rolled machine learning into the Hadoop equivalent which, yeah, that’d definitely be a killer feature to have handy.
DropWizard is a layer of libraries. ES6 is which Javascript they are using. React is an open-source library/framework for developing UI that was created and is maintained by Meta (that would be FB to everyone who is struggling to keep up).
Honestly, I have no idea why I’d never heard of Kotlin before. It’s a computer language that is designed to run on the Java virtual machine with Java libraries and is interoperable with Java, but has some nice-to-have things like OO and static type checking. It is at moments like this that I have to tell myself, firmly, NO, walkitout. You are NOT going to go just take a quick look and see what is going on over there because it might be kind of interesting. NO. However, I might ask R. Apparently google uses Kotlin for android app development.
ETA: R. had not heard of Kotlin, but had heard of the tools shop that developed it and did not have any particular negative association with them.
Are you still here? Why?
I like their stack. It is flexible and powerful and leverages well-established (not bleeding edge), current, competitive-in-class components, without being overly wedded to a particular universe. If I were looking for a job coding or doing architecture, _which I absolutely am not_, I’d be very attracted to this company.