craigmcn

I ended up with a few extra days of work recently because someone mentioned people doing something stupid, and I chose to make it stop.

A question about my solution came in this morning that forced me to write this post.

As you know, I work at a post-secondary education institution. I would expect people to be (a) smarter than the average population, and (b) more inclined to seek out solutions to problems. Obviously, that’s not necessarily the case.

We have a search function to allow students to input their classes and get their exam schedule. Apparently, faculty and staff have been using the function to find schedules for whole subjects and departments. Surprisingly (to them, not to me), it didn’t work very well. It’s for students, it works really well for them. It’s not for you, it doesn’t work well for you. No one thought to ask for a new search function.

So I built a new function specifically for faculty and staff. Select a department, a subject or both, and find all the related exams. Q: The [undisclosed] department doesn’t find their name in the selection list. Why not? A: (slightly sarcastically) They schedule their own exams, so their exams don’t appear in the exam schedule.

It seemed perfectly reasonable to me not to include options that wouldn’t produce results. Perhaps I was incorrect.