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High Tech Vending Machines Transform IT Support At Facebook
Hugh Pickens writes "While getting power cords, replacement keyboards, and other sundry computer accessories to employees who need them sounds easy enough, at many companies the process requires filling out order forms that can take IT departments days to fulfill. That's why Facebook CIO Tim Campos decided to take a more user-friendly approach to this common problem, installing custom-made vending machines around the Facebook campus that dispense computer accessories instead of snacks and sodas. When Facebook engineers spill coffee on their keyboard (a common mishap), they head to a nearby vending machine instead of hitting up their IT guy or just grabbing a replacement from a nearby cabinet. They swipe their badge, key in their selection and voila — a brand new keyboard drops down for them to take. According to Campos, they've reduced the cost of managing replacement accessories by about 35%. While products found in the vending machines are free, items are clearly marked with price tags so employees can see the retail value of each accessory they take. The new vending machines also require all employees to swipe their badge before making a selection. That means each and every power cord, keyboard and screen wipe they take can be traced back to their name, ensuring that the system won't be abused. 'I like the assumption that employees will do the right thing,' writes Alexis Madrigal. 'The swipe means that everyone's requests are tracked and I'm sure some algorithm somewhere is constantly sorting the data to see if anyone has pulled 10 sets of headphones out of the system.'"
Do employees have to trek across campus to get the vending machine they like that stocks their particular favored model of headset, mouse or keyboard?(Model M preferably)
Do they sometime get stuck requiring quickly looking around to make sure no one is looking then banging the machine a few times?
Inquiring minds want to know!
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
Intel has been using these, at least in our campus, for a few years now.
The price tag idea is fantastic, I can steal Frank's badge, and grab myself 10 of everything. List it on ebay at the tagged price and make a nice bonus every week.
how do they track jam's and double drops?
At least it's free so you have some kicking the shit out of it when it eats your cash.
Have a supply closet behind a locked door so you need your badge to open it up and a motion activated camera taking shots of you while you take whatever you want.
If inventory starts to drop then look at the photos to see if anyone is abusing the system.
"Reduced the cost of managing replacement accessories by about 35%."
They are reducing the overhead of talking to a support person, them getting a part off the shelf, marking down that it has been removed by whom for whom for what reason, and all the rest. Something mentioned in the summary.
DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Shakespeare invents 'your mom'
Vending Machines, hmm?
How long until the vending system gets a Facebook page? Then when everyone orders Such&Such keyboard and headphones, the machine can post "Joe Smith Likes this!" Then they can sell that data to advertisers!
Do Vending Machines have Friends?
The fun never stops!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Great, I guess the keyboard or whatever shitty peripheral will get stuck and then after beating and shaking the vending machine for 10 fucking minutes you'll end-up calling help-desk to complain that you swiped and you never got your item so they'll send out an vending service guy and spend $400/hr to fix the fucking crappy vending machine rather keep a stack of $2 dollar keyboards in a closet next to the receptionist or secretary. Then again It's Facebook, so I guess their developers/admins must jiz a lot all over their keyboards while they porn surf through user profiles of hot bitches.
'I like the assumption that employees will do the right thing,' writes Alexis Madrigal. 'The swipe means that everyone's requests are tracked and I'm sure some algorithm somewhere is constantly sorting the data to see if anyone has pulled 10 sets of headphones out of the system.'
I do not think that the word "assumption" means what Alexis thinks it means.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
If they're smart, they probably do some kind of vendor managed inventory and just like the way soda machines are stocked, some dude from the computer parts supply place comes in and makes sure its full of stuff. The vendor owns the inventory and they have an incentive to keep it stocked so that there's product to be bought. I think office supply companies like Staples and Office Max offer services like this for traditional office supplies.
The dumb way would be to have someone in IT manage the vending machine and spending their time ordering things in ones and twos to keep the machine stocked.
Acklands Grainger actually rents these machines out stocked with whatever you want that's relevant to your business... the display model in our local distributor has boxcutters, pens, high-viz vests, etc...
When Facebook engineers spill coffee on their keyboard (a common mishap),
I've been a system programmer/administrator for over 25 years and routinely eat and drink at my desk and have *never* spilled anything on my equipment - computer or otherwise. What kind of monkeys do they hire at Facebook?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Ok. So I'm assuming this is for people that aren't supporting datacenter based equipment. Y'know the guys that have to plug in thousands of powercords...
So if you're outfitting your cube/desk area, how many keyboards and power cords do you go through? Also, do most FB employees standardize on the 'vending machine' keyboard, or do they have their own personal preference?
I just don't understand spilling coffee on a keyboard to the point it ruins it.
I drink a great deal of coffee at my computer. It's the first thing I do in the morning, if I'm to do anything for the first 3 hours after I wake up..
I think I can count on one hand how many times I've dribbled coffee onto my keyboard. It's usually into my lap, if anywhere, or a small splash from overly-groggy pouring of the water into my french press.. yeah that happens.
Keyboard? Just fine.
Now, BEER? I've spilled me some beer into this keyboard. Tasty dopplebock, gone.. Had I been in an office the keyboard may have died, but I launched quickly into shutting the comp down and (drunkenly) shuffling my keyboard into the bathtub.
And whiskey. Well. When shots are being shot and you're trying to pour the next shot with one eye so there's only one shot glass.. your keyboard drinks, too.
And it's full of ash, because I'm a filthy human being.
I just don't understand how people can break keyboards so easily. I've got a groove worn halfway through the ALT key on this thing thanks to my thumbnail and the nubs on my F and J key are worn to pointlessness, and it still works fine.
Best I can figure is people think spill = broken, and to hell with trying to recover what may be a perfectly functional piece of equipment (disposable economy kids..)
Either that, or milk and sugar are really really ungodly bad for keyboards, worse than beer, and so my plethora of black coffee droppings are an M80 to the mochaccino's Tsar Bomba
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
It sounds like they're vending accessories like mice and keyboards, rather than internal components like memory and such.
I suspect it's pretty easy for the company and the vendor to agree in advance to a list of parts/accessories that will be supplied and what the prices will be.
If Facebook is letting the vendor screw them, then that's their stupidity to allow that.
Everyone gets the same computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and choice of supported OS so IT has a limited set of hardware/OS combinations to support. You break something, you get your ass to Fry's and buy the replacement on your own dime. You want something new and cool to try? You pay for it out of your own pocket. Need something different for a new project? You get your boss to budget it and work up a PO or buy it from Fry's and expense it on petty cash. You can save buy not having vending machines and paying IT staff to supply trinkets.
How is that cheaper?
If my keyboard on my work supplied computer breaks then it needs to be replaced. If I have to argue with someone about who's fault it is that it got broken, and therefore who's 'dime' needs to pay for my time to go down to Fry's and buy a replacement then a whole lot of time and money is getting wasted. And thats without factoring in the cost of the thing that broke, which most likely doesn't change the equation in any significant way.
I bet Facebook already did the math and your way isn't cheaper. You'd have to be a large enough company to make this idea scale, but Facebook is that.
Facebook isn't being original here. Fastenall, which sells cutting tools, bolts, and other useful things used by people who make Real Stuff, has special vending machines for industrial plants. Employees use their employee badge or a PIN to get tools and supplies. The machines report back to Fastenall, and they restock the machines. The customer only pays for items when they're vended.
Here's the Youtube video. Fastenall vends electric drills and WD-40, rather than keyboards and cables. They have little machines for things like drill bits, and locker-sized bins for big items. So they're already doing what Facebook is only talking about.
Fastenal uses the exact same vending machine (minus all the photos of course!).
Right. It's an Edge 5000 Industrial Vending Machine from Apex Supply Chain Technologies. Fastenall has about 30,000 installed. Facebook, not so many.
These industrial vending machines look like candy machines, but they're more versatile. They can be configured for a wide range of item sizes, they have an IR beam system to make sure the item actually is dispensed, and there are options available for soft handling of fragile items. The machines have an Internet connection, report who got what, and tell the supplier what needs refilling.
'I like the assumption that employees will do the right thing,'
Does this guy actually believe that bullshit? All they've done is increase the monitoring (insert obligatory facebook derogatory tracking comment) - there is less assumption of doing the right thing in this system than there is a with a human IT department.
With a human from the IT department in the loop that human has discretion in accounting for the costs of the hardware. If he knows a group has a tight budget but really needs a replacement doohickey, he can fudge the reporting - push it to the next quarter or put on another group that's got a budget surplus. This system removes all slack.
Maybe right now while facebook is flush with cash it ain't economical to bother looking at the reports from these vending machines beyond crazy outliers that would indicate fraud. But when budgets get tight, this system has the potential to be be far more rigid than one with that extra layer of humans in it.
This way may be a good thing, but lying about its strengths is not a good sign. Don't roofie me and call it romance...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The swipe means that everyone's requests are tracked and I'm sure some algorithm somewhere is constantly sorting the data ...
So there's a screen on the front of the vending machine that displays targeted advertising then?
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
How grubby are facebook employees? I've had maybe five broken keyboards in the past 3 years. One of them was from a spilled drink onto the keyboard. That's 0.3 people a year due to a spilled drink. Now sure, we only have 250 staff. So let's assume facebook has 30,0000 staff. That's 40 keyboards a year. I can't believe these vending machines are cheaper then ordering 40 keyboards a year.
Just how messy are facebook employees to need enough keyboards due to coffee spills? Is it an American thing?
One could just "swipe" the desired accessory from someone else's desk. That would be much more difficult to track.
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They are not "High Tech Vending Machines". They are normal vending machines loaded with computer accessories. "Facebook CIO Tim Campos decided to take a more user-friendly approach" should be "a computer support employee recommended using vending machines", according to the story.
as opposed to just having the receptionist have a cabinet with the stuff who can hand it out? yeah. We did this same thing at Comcast 10 years ago, except instead of vending machines we used the receptionist at each office as the vending machine... worked great.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
When Facebook engineers spill coffee on their keyboard
A company like Facebook doesn't need any engineers although some might work for them. Engineers typically work for companies like Intel, Cisco, etc.
I am a software architect but not an engineer by trade. The "engineer" term is abused a lot. The funniest thing I have heard is the "engineer" driving the locomotive on a railway train. His title is "engine man" in realty. Apparently, if you say it quickly enough many times, "engine man" becomes "engineer". Michael Schumacher should be called an "engineer" before anybody driving a train !
Just see how the following links do not add up if you believe a locomotive driver is an "engineer" and apply the same to Facebook engineers :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_engineer
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I don't understand why everybody assumes that there's some kind of sinister going-ons behind having users ID themselves when getting equipment. Facebook is a data-driven company, why wouldn't they want to have this kind of data? You can automate procurement, so you effectively never run out of equipment. You can see what kind of equipment your users prefer. And the realization that you're not completely anonymous keeps people honest - not just as far as theft goes (and I can assure you, it doesn't matter how much people make, they will steal the most trite, insignificant crap), but general absentmindedness or practical jokes.
I prefer the method at my company.
1. Order whatever I like using a form on the intranet
2. Boss gets an automatic email that says "Click this link to authorise..."
3. Boss calls me over to ask what the email is about.
4. "Just click the link" I say.
5. Hardware arrives a week later.
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