
Show HN: Staffjoy Boss – Automated Employee Scheduling - philip1209
https://www.staffjoy.com/boss/
======
philip1209
Hello - Andrew Hess and I are the founders of Staffjoy. We went through the
first YC Fellowship class, where we launched automated contractor scheduling.

Today we are excited to launch Staffjoy Boss, our automated application for
employee scheduling. At the core, we have rewritten how scheduling works so
that we schedule workers when they prefer to work. We have also added features
like time off requests, clock-in/clock-out, and employment law compliance we
make it easy to have Staffjoy run a business of hourly workers.

On the technical side, we've rewritten our algorithms to search beyond optimal
staffing levels for canonical optimal solutions that make employees happy. So,
if one person prefers morning and the other prefers afternoon, from an
optimality perspective it doesn't matter who gets assigned to which shift -
but we'll try to put workers in their preferred time slot so that they are
happier and more productive.

Finally, today we are also announcing our first round of funding today with
participation from Semil Shah, Ray Tonsing, David Ulevitch, and others. More
details are available at
[https://blog.staffjoy.com](https://blog.staffjoy.com)

~~~
DataJunkie
Super cool. In grad school I developed a system to schedule TAs for a new
student counselor. I used simulated annealing because it was related to
something I had just learned in class, and because it wasn't heuristic.

It's an interesting problem because there are so many ways to define
optimality. Does it mean working with the same manager? Working at the same
facility? Minimizing travel between facilities? Number of shift in a week?
etc. The problem can be extended with reinforcement learning with employee
feedback. If there are manager preferences as well, there is a two-player
problem with two perhaps competing interests.

I would love to work on this problem with high school scheduling for building
both a master schedule and individual student schedules. No clue where I would
get data though.

It's a very cool problem.

~~~
philip1209
I agree! We did an interview focused more on the pure mathematics side here:

[http://www.aistartups.org/2016/02/interview-with-philip-
thom...](http://www.aistartups.org/2016/02/interview-with-philip-thomas-
ceofounder.html?m=1)

Class scheduling for schools is a huge issue but selling to schools is a
nightmare. That means that turning it into a business would be really hard.

~~~
DataJunkie
Yeah anything with schools is a nightmare. It would be more of a project than
a product for me because Zangle and MMS already have the market completely
saturated, at least in California.

------
physcab
I have a number of friends who work in the restaurant industry including some
very close friends who are opening a restaurant and their families have
numerous restaurants throughout the Bay Area. I'm quite familiar with this
pain point. Some questions:

1\. Who are you targeting this to - small businesses or large managed groups?

2\. How will you compete with time trackers as they get integrated with POS?
Does yours integrate?

3\. How are you going to handle training? In my experience, people in the
restaurant business do not know technology and any type of software requires
extensive training.

4\. Do shift managers find value over using their own existing methods?

The pricing seems ok but it's a tough market. Small businesses with hourly
workers do not have a ton of money, while larger groups already have solutions
in place. Just my 2 cents.

~~~
philip1209
Restaurants are an interesting vertical because their technology is largely
horizontally-integrated and heavily reliant on the POS system. We're currently
working with courier companies and call centers primarily, and looking to move
into retail, hospitality, and eventually medicine.

1\. Who are you targeting this to - small businesses or large managed groups?

Our target customers are in the range of 50 to 150 employees per location, and
we support multiple locations (e.g. a chain). We've worked with teams as small
as 8 and as large as 400.

2\. How will you compete with time trackers as they get integrated with POS?
Does yours integrate?

The main benefit of time trackers in Staffjoy is that we can compare them to
scheduled shifts. Detecting problems (missed shifts, truancy, clocking in
without a shift) becomes significantly more powerful, and over time we can
begin to model the performance of workers.

We support integrations and are amid publishing our first. At least one app is
looking to trigger clock-in/clock-out events from their courier app to our API
using this. We have an open-source Python client for our API and will be
publishing better API resources in the coming weeks.
[https://github.com/staffjoy/client_python](https://github.com/staffjoy/client_python)

3\. How are you going to handle training? In my experience, people in the
restaurant business do not know technology and any type of software requires
extensive training.

We're onboarding in new verticals very manually right now to learn the best
way and develop more scalable training.

4\. Do shift managers find value over using their own existing methods?

Yes, because we automate a lot of decisions. The software shines when a new
shift needs to be covered - e.g. somebody calls in sick - and the manager can
find a replacement without having to recalculate a variety of overtime
scenarios.

~~~
physcab
Cool. Happy to see you're focused on other verticals that would be willing to
pay. I see it every day with my friends. Manager sends out PDF of schedule,
giant white board in back office, calls to manager on day of shift to
reschedule. Manual optimization to cover the over / under problems. Plus the
laws. As an engineer I was screaming but never could figure out how to make
the business a good sell over their entrenched ways and existing ways of
tracking.

~~~
philip1209
Exactly. There are a lot of problems worth solving in the space - like shift
swapping, communication tools, etc - but what we found is that
distribution/adoption becomes the largest issue, so to solve issues like PDF
schedules it is better to target the core inefficiency of how scheduling
works.

------
brianjking
Awesome, congrats. Is there a hybrid option between boss and the normal
ataffjoy?

Secondly, how would this work for an events based company that may have 8
events throughout the world during a given time period?

~~~
philip1209
Flex is our product for contractors - where workers claim shifts.

Boss is our product for employees -where workers are assigned shifts.

They're very similar products, but we can't tell contractors when to work -
they pick - and we don't have compliance built in for contractors (mainly
because they pick when they work).

For the events company - we have timezone support for each location. As you
start to add locations with different timezones, Staffjoy begins to show more
localization information to aid in scheduling.

~~~
raywu
We have been looking for a solution. Can you talk more about compliance?

~~~
philip1209
Sure. For each role, you can set how many hours a person works in a workday
(e.g. California limits 8 hours before overtime), and how many consecutive
days they may work (e.g. California limits to 6 consecutive workdays in a
workweek before overtime - we technically go beyond this and limit to 6
consecutive days independent of the window). For a worker, you may set how
many hours per workweek they may work (e.g. 30-40 hours).

We define a workday as midnight to midnight, and you control the workweek
start day when you create the trial.

Other nice-to-have features include that we try to give consecutive days off
(like a weekend) when possible and we allow you to control the minimum amount
of time between shifts to prevent "clopens" (e.g. when a worker closes at
midnight then gets assigned the opening shift at 7am).

If you have more detailed questions, I'm happy to answer them via email too
(philip at staffjoy)

~~~
raywu
Thanks Philip, rying to set up workers to roles, but kept on getting an error

~~~
andhess
Hi Ray, Thank you for reporting this. A fix is on its way out and should be
live shortly.

------
buckbova
Wouldn't consider this a "show hn". There's no code, demo or even screenshots
I could see.

~~~
philip1209
You can set up a free trial (no credit card required) to get a sandbox where
you can interact with the application!

~~~
ProAm
Some sort of demo would be nice, Im not going to sign up for something when I
have no idea what it is (beyond a text description).

~~~
philip1209
There's an 80-second overview on our Youtube:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I_StYG_cI4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I_StYG_cI4)

------
edko
I couldn't find the pricing page. It is nice that you offer a 14-day free
trial, but, wouldn't a potential user want to know how much it would cost
beyond that?

~~~
philip1209
Pricing is on the homepage -apologies for not copying to our Boss overview:

[https://www.staffjoy.com](https://www.staffjoy.com)

~~~
edko
Got it. Thanks.

------
jakestl
How does it handle sick days? If I say I'm going to be sick tomorrow does it
reschedule the entire next day or is that a manual process?

~~~
philip1209
For time off handling:

1) If you haven't been scheduled yet - a sick day or approved time off request
blocks you from being scheduled

2) If you have been scheduled - Staffjoy removes you from the shift, and other
workers can claim it. (When showing available shifts to workers, we maintain
compliance so that only workers eligible to take the shift can do so).

~~~
Vraxx
I think the more pressing question that was implied by "sick days" is what
happens if nobody claims the shift before the shift starts? Sick days are
often unplanned and have much less notice, so other employees may have no idea
that a shift is available or it might be to short of notice for any other
employee to cover it. How do (presumably) manual overrides happen in this
scenario?

~~~
philip1209
Right now workers can claim available shifts, and managers can assign them
manually (including viewing whether an assignment may trigger overtime). More
advanced shift swapping workflows will be published in the coming months too!

------
julianozen
Congrats on the launch and the several weeks of iteration.

~~~
philip1209
Thank you!

------
netvarun
s/Staffoy/Staffjoy/

~~~
dang
Thanks, fixed.

