Totally agree with you. Oddly enough I am currently doing a market research project on commercial applications for Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) and also Constrained Binary Optimization. Anyway we were talking about UPS, and just for reference if I search my 3 degree network on LinkedIn for the combination of CPLEX (an IBM optimization package) and UPS I got almost 400 hits. Now admittedly some of those people used to work at UPS, some work there now. But there are clearly many, many computer scientists, operations research scientists and mathematicians working on these and other optimization problems at UPS.

On the other hand the grandparent comment just illustrates how even with all those optimization resources individual "decisions" may still be stupid in the moment even though the overall solution is "good enough".

Yeah, UPS is pretty famous for how much effort they put into optimizing routes: https://www.ups.com/us/en/services/knowledge-center/article....

I highly doubt someone could beat them in an hour at a hackathon by just saying “shortest path first” and calling it solved.