Yes. Took a job with a defense contractor in the UK. On day 1 they told me that it would take 6 months to get security clearance. The bummer was that the men's bathroom was in a secure area and I would have to be escorted every time. On day 1 I quit.
Round about 1998 I worked in software pre-sales, and visited ARM in Cambridge, UK to try to convince them to buy our software. They didn't. My bad. But the guy I met was so ecstatic that they had just had an IPO, I bought £3K's worth of ARM stock on the back of his infectious enthusiasm. Over the next few months they rose to ... £140K but my greed held no bounds and the inevitable happened as the dot com boom boomed. I got out at +£20K but still rue my poor decision making. Of course, had I held for the long term, I would have made a lot more.
Well, I agree in principle, but fact is, I've never worked for an organization that didn't have its share of stupid rules. 'Stupid' is subjective as well, so I think it's a bit of a losing battle to up sticks every time you encounter an organizational habit you don't like. Sure, there'll be a tipping point, but I think it's fundamental to the nature of organizations that they can't please all people all the time.
I think it depends if you're interested in knowing how to solve these problems, or simply in solving them. If the latter, there's a bunch of commercial solvers out there. I won't name any for fear of an adverse reaction :0) but a trawl through the first page of Google results for 'optimization solvers' would probably work.
more about the how is what interests me. I just find it fascinating. I've tried nearest neighbour, ant colony and simmulated annealing thus far (Or read about them and tweaked some code)
