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Comment by cmdkeen | Hacker News Reader

I'm an in house dev for a financial company - if you really want to "stress test" a financial institution turn off Excel for a week and you'll find all the things you never realised people were doing. I've been bitten far too frequently to ever believe what the product owners says a process is, there's always a spreadsheet somewhere used to work around the existing system...

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I'd like to affirm your view that work arounds are a fact of life in finance, and frankly, other white-collar enterprises as well.

While they're stashed relatively deep in my memory banks (mostly for the purpose of forgetting), I do have dozens of experiences 'touching up' PDFs, reverse engineering or cloning things from PDFs of PowerPoint presentations, or otherwise using whatever digital hammer and chisel would get the job done. Screenshot > Paint > Fix > PDF, boom!

Love that. I'm working in group benefits insurance now and spreadsheets are how everyone communicates. The software is just there to hold the data in between spreadsheet imports and exports.

Are the spreadsheets doing real number crunching? Do they use XLLs and VBA, or just worksheet functions?

Very often yes, to a scary degree. The amount of data normalization, adjustments, aggregation, analysis, etc that happens in some poorly documented and ill maintained macro is mind-boggling (there is a term for it - a model/process being "offline", i.e. not properly source-controlled or auditable).

The real reason is because Excel is still by far the simplest, quickest way to get something done fast when the deadlines are always "yesterday!".

I was in finance as well as trading risk management at one of the largest physical commodities trading houses in the world ($100+ billion revenue) and orders, positions, PNL, inventory, inventory movements, market research and analysis, and general business reports... yes, very expensive systems backing them... and they had to be done on Excel manually and synced daily to make sure if the main systems (absurdly complex) got out of sync, either one could be repaired as a failsafe.

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