Hacker News Reader

Somebody said that before starting a startup you should evaluate what your competition is, and that includes Excel.

Many, many startups are competing against a moderately-complex Excel sheet, and they don't even know that.

Absolutely agree- however, in many cases these types of companies can still be decent businesses. Being able to work with and adjust "moderately complex" Excel sheets requires a certain level of training and skill- often these startups can remove the requirement for expertise to perform a task, which can be worth quite a bit to a business.

The biggest feature of Excel is its flexibility. That moderately complicated spreadsheet can and does change all the time, to accomodate new requirements and optimize workflow. A startup (or the internal IT department) doing one-size-fits-all solution can't really do that.

> The biggest feature of Excel is its flexibility

This is probably its biggest flaw also — chances are you don't need all that flexibility within a scope of particular spreadsheet; and sometime you may prefer a solution that was specifically targetting this exact usecase.

Yeah, but a programming language would be even more flexible, and yet nobody says they don't need software because they have all the tools to implement its functionality themselves.

In fact, I worked on a project that largely aimed to replace a bunch of internal spreadsheets because giving groups a spreadsheet to maintain is a little like handing Phaeton the reins to Apollo's chariot.

Sure a programming language would be even more flexible, but it does not have an instant feedback loop like Excel does. Not to mention that the extra flexibility comes with the cost of dealing with all the arcane bullshit programming involves - toolchains, APIs, what have you. Excel is flexible enough to be useful by non-tech people and doesn't bring in so much cruft.

My intent was to highlight the flaws of the argument that Excel is better because it is more flexible with a more extreme example.

> Yeah, but a programming language would be even more flexible

Then it's convenient that Excel both is a and has a programming language, eh?

I am frustrated I can only upvote once!

If HN were an Excel sheet, you could upvote as many times as you want! :-)

I could automate in VBA me upvoting. Try to do that in a business application!

Upvotes mean nothing, displays of gratitude mean a lot. Not my quote, but I'm glad you liked it!

Many startups are a nicely designed version of an Excel built-in template.

As a programmer I deeply appreciate the hate towards IT in companies and replacing Excel with complex internal apps. Those apps pretty much never capture the actual workflow (by virtue of requirements being provided by management instead of actual users), and even if they did, the workflow constantly changes. Excel spreadsheets may be cringeworthy sometimes, but they're used by people because you don't have to be a trained expert to make them work, and you don't have to submit requests to other departments to change something simple.

> As a programmer I deeply appreciate the hate towards IT in companies and replacing Excel with complex internal apps

You have to know the right point at which to make the transition. We had an Excel spreadsheet used for managing 10-digit sums of investments, held together with sticky tape, integrating SQL queries, XLL C++ addins (plural), Corba, creative use of the Excel solver and pivot tables in addition to custom data overrides (being Excel, without version control or sane error handling).

That point where operational risk exceeds the benefits of flexibility is a sign that you want to get some programmers on it - and we did, even at a cost of 10 programmer person-years or more in replacing that spreadsheet, and a horrendously slow and cumbersome process to get even trivial bugfixes or features added.

Frustration would be a more appropriate term than hate.

Rarely.

> I am not sure that the audience of hacker news realises how terrible is the reputation of IT and developers in large companies from the business side. They are seen as a world of hyper-bureaucratic, common sense-free, business sense-hostile, half-assed lemmings.

Usually decisions like building a $50m application aren't made by devs but by clueless managers.

I do agree with the sentiment though, I see a lot of wheels reinvented everywhere I look. Recently I had to deal with a scheduler and a file remover/archive that were built in house. God know how many hours were wasted on this but the whole thing would work better as a batch script and a scheduled task.

I agree that there are often absurd requirement on the business side, just because they don't understand the tech and the problems a minor feature in their mind will cause down the line.

That's where project managers/change people are supposed to help, acting as an intermediary, understanding both the tech and the business. But in my experience they usually understand neither the tech nor the business and are adding more confusion, the whole thing works better without them.

But the state of corporate IT is sad to look at. I work in a large organisation where one of the executives was telling us proudly at a townhall that we have more developers than Facebook and Google together (though we are in the financial sector). Well, to say the least, we have little to show for it. Nothing works properly. Our core systems still run on programs written decades ago and we have to pull people from retirement if, after having exhausted all other possible options, we have to make a minor change. The network drives have a top speed of 1MB/s, and hang sometimes for minutes. As for the business applications. Any minor change results in ETA in months if not years and multi-millions quotes.

I remember discussing with some devs about an Excel VBA addin they were taking over from the business. They re-wrote most of the features in .net, which is very good, but somehow half of their application was still written in VBA, and I mean tons of VBA. I wondered why. They told me the library they were using only allowed to expose a function to Excel, but not to hook to or manipulate the UI. So they have written a VBA wrapper around all of their features that calls the .net excel functions.

There was a long silence after I showed them how they can get a handle to the COM interface of Excel in a single line of .net code using that library.

> Our core systems still run on programs written decades ago and we have to pull people from retirement if, after having exhausted all other possible options, we have to make a minor change. The network drives have a top speed of 1MB/s, and hang sometimes for minutes. As for the business applications. Any minor change results in ETA in months if not years and multi-millions quotes.

That's what happen when IT is treated as a cost center instead of a co-leader of innovation together with business. Bad hires, no real objectives, no liberty to innovate: do that constantly for decades and you end up in the situation you describe.

You can't really blame the IT guys that are thrown in that mess. It's almost always a top management fault.

> There was a long silence after I showed them how they can get a handle to the COM interface of Excel in a single line of .net code using that library.

Looks like they are lacking a good tech lead, why not apply yourself? :)

Don't forget the political.

A lot of large corporate IT is outsourced to the likes of HP. It's not unknown for them to put in the least qualified folks they think they can get away with - which can often mean in the case of unusual infrastructure, libraries or languages that they sent someone on a basic training course the week before starting. This leads to the quality you might expect.

The two most "interesting" contracts of my career were in financial. One was trying to reverse 25+ years of bad decisions and no end of duplicated, wrong, and unsanitised garbage in the live DB along with some dependency on CICS that fortunately I was far away from. The other will remain undiscussed. :)

> though we are in the financial sector

That explains it. I'm working in finance at the moment too, it's where you find the worst developers/management/products.

I'm betting the current situation there is caused by some combination of technical debt and the dead sea effect (also coined by spolsky I believe). Once things get to a certain point competent people leave and by attrition you're left with the ones unemployable elsewhere.

>> though we are in the financial sector > That explains it. I'm working in finance at the moment too, it's where you find the worst developers/management/products.

I second that opinion. There's a lack of depth of knowledge on the IT/Coding side, and people think it's just another little cog that they need to get their deals done.

So you get things like

- Complex derivatives calculated on Excel. You wonder why people make millions on this? It's because you never really know what the heck you're calculating.

- Missed deadlines that should be cron jobs. I remember a guy coming into the office, down a good few hundred grand because he'd forgotten to exercise options that had a dividend on them. I mean that's just stupid, if you had a proper system it would tell you, and the calendar would be synced with Bloomberg.

- Ridiculous budgets. A friend at a major bank is on a $27M project that is essentially a calculator that adds two numbers together. Other people are attempting to break into HFT with zero competent coders, no network other than what can be leased cheaply, and no systems engineers.

- Balls of spaghetti of unimaginable proportions. One c++ guy at a big bank told me he takes 7 hours to compile. He's writing execution code, which you'd think would be relatively snappy.

>- Balls of spaghetti of unimaginable proportions. One c++ guy at a big bank told me he takes 7 hours to compile. He's writing execution code, which you'd think would be relatively snappy.

How long should it take? The last time I did anything of note in c++ was on a computer of 2000's vintage and 7 hour builds were pretty common.

If you're taking seven hours to build, you have too few computers per programmer. Compiling C++ parallelizes well, and computers are dirt cheap compared to the cost of employing people.

A few minutes. And that's for a pretty comprehensive HFT system, cleaned.

If you're taking hours there's just a lot of dependencies that could probably be refactored.

> how terrible is the reputation of IT and developers in large companies from the business side. They are seen as a world of hyper-bureaucratic, common sense-free, business sense-hostile, half-assed lemmings.

Large non-tech hyper-bureaucratic common-sense-free companies are especially hostile toward good IT and dev so good people just don't work there ;)

[and even if they did, they still couldn't get anything done]

Somehow IT manages to be an order of magnitude more bureaucratic than the rest of the company. Perhaps a case of IT people trying to be more catholic than the pope in a bureaucratic company!

This is exactly the truth. The environments are suffocating and good people are only moderately more productive and don't stick around long.

Some people in corporate BI, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll build a cube." Now they have two problems.

Credit goes to: https://blog.codinghorror.com/regular-expressions-now-you-ha...

> This week I am trying to extract data from a data cube that was created for reporting. Problem, the cube was designed so that only one node can be retrieved at a time, and so if I need a bulk retrieval, which I need, ...

Sorta OT, but this is one of the more sci-fi sentences one could say that actually makes sense.

As consultant having to advise and work with IT departments. Could agree more on the reputation comment.