I work at a large company that invested countless dev hours in building an automated shift scheduling system, then gave up, bought a scheduling system from a ve

I work at a large company that invested countless dev hours in building an automated shift scheduling system, then gave up, bought a scheduling system from a vendor, and has now spent several years tweaking that system to match their requirements. Guess what? It works OK when everything is fine, but if anything even mildly out of the ordinary happens and more than a few people are unavailable for any reason (year-end holidays, travel, conferences, etc), boom, it's back to a manager manually putting together the schedule again. And this is the best case scenario with motivated, largely self-managing employees who can be trusted to, say, figure out shift swaps if something comes up at short notice. Good luck automating scheduling at McDonalds, and remember this is only a tiny part of what a manager has to deal with every day.