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Comment by mynameisvlad | Hacker News Reader

It's less "not wanting to help people" and more "once people know you're 'the Excel person' they come to you for everything to do with Excel". It's very similar to being 'the computer person' in a family/group of friends and everyone coming to you with all their various tech support questions. At a certain point, it starts ruining your productivity since you get taken out of your regular job to do these one time help requests.

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This is my experience working in offices like law firms that are filled with people that have limited technical aptitude for using software. Showing any sort of competency is a recipe for increasing your workload with no conferred benefits.

Yeah, it’s draining. They have no desire or intention to learn. You’re not helping them, you’re just doing their job for them.

Yours, former excel guy.

I always looked at it as being great job security.

"You haven't completed any of your assignments while your co-workers all exhibit improved productivity. For this reason, I'm giving you a poor performance review."

Never once seen it play out like that. Most people understand that your work comes before the help they need.

That's fine, the problem is that you also get all the blame as well. Once you "fix" a computer, everything that will break will suddenly be your fault.

Very true. I once installed a printer driver in a friend's company. I got blamed for missing files by several employees during the following weeks.

I've heard that auto mechanics know these as "Ever since you..." stories.

My former boss, in process of bidding for a bigger highway maintenance job, started with me with How can we do this in excel? Can we get all these X? etc basic questions, solved with vlookup or index or things. Things slowly shifted to just do this this & this, no desire of learning 5o know how, & the tasks became my extra responsibility, & anything breaks in that sheet because of long tangled inter-dependent cells, it will be my fault. Too much draining & taxing on mind.

It's quite similar to being a senior programmer and assisting junior colleagues instead of doing their own work. Though in this case I suppose the blame falls on management for not allocating time properly.

Since I work in technology, people would sometimes ask for my help fixing a computer, to whom I would clarify: no, no, no, I'm a Software Engineer -- I'm the person responsible for breaking the computers.

And it's one thing if they actually appreciate your help.

In places that people don't realize it's part of their job to learn the tools, it often turns into complaints of "why they designed it that way?" going on and on with dissatisfaction of the system that doesn't read their mind. (And certainly, they will come back with the same question in few days...)

I've been there a decade ago and it was DRAINING that I was just better off not offering the help altogether.

There is a difference between "doing other people's job" and "enabling them to learn on their own" in my experience. Explaining to someone why it is better to use INDEX MATCH in lieu of VLOOKUP will never ruin my productivity.

Explaining it to the same person for the 15th time though...

As a career educator, and ruling out learning disabilities that are not appropriately accommodated, I believe that generally means you're not doing a good job of explaining in a way the other person is capable of grasping.

Blame goes both ways. And the original point still stands. It is productive to teach someone to improve their own processes.

One difference between your experiences as an educator and the parent's experiences as an Office Excel Guy is that educators have a position of authority, and there is generally an ethos of paying attention and trying to remember what they're telling you!

^ This. Office Excel Guy is just glorified IT help desk. People don't want an explanation, don't want to learn how to use excel necessarily. They want want to push one button, and get a result. Spend longer than 5 minutes explaining it and you will be told you're wasting their time.

You spend time explaining on what is essentially deaf ears, and being on call all the time

Educators tend to have alignment on students' skill levels too, and perhaps not so with "Excel support." It's actually easier to help someone who knows nothing about the subject. What I struggled in the past are those who think they know what they are doing, yet require help in narrower scope.

They often have often accumulated bad habit, and won't listen to you because "I have been doing this way for years."

Also, it's interesting to observe that many who struggle in Excel (or many of "consumer" applications) actually are struggling in basic computing skills. (e.g. can't tell difference between left and right mouse buttons, don't know how to copy files, etc.) It often result in infuriated people, pointing out that they need to learn basics of the operating system.

This is a reasonable approach for someone whose primary role is educating others.

It rapidly recedes from the realm of reasonable considerations once we're talking about someone providing informal Excel support to colleagues as an extracurricular activity.

I disagree. You tell them how to do it. You ensure they have no questions. You have them show you that they know how.

Then you destroy their work area with a hammer when they come back for more help on the same thing. (obviously humor)

It's just like teaching.

Source: I'm the 'excel guy' in my service area. I tell them I'll show you twice and I'll make sure you don't have any questions. Then I'll show you youtube videos. I'm not in the business of 'doing' for anyone.

There’s a clear trade off in terms of time and annoyance, and getting good at teaching or communicating with different people.

Being able to share mastery is a key part of being a master at a subject, which is a political and image advantage.

I used my excel ability to learn how to best explain vlookup and got good at it.

I did get taken advantage of early on, but I learnt how to deal with those specific types of users, and not do their work for them.

In contrast to those people, there are others who genuinely respect you for your help, and then use your training to make their life and yours better.

Not to mention, many excel problems are not that hard. If you know what you are doing, it’s an easy win/goodwill for you, and a major problem for someone else solved.

You can't teach someone who doesn't want to learn. Most people in this situation don't want to learn and actively tune you out. They just want you to fix their problem and if they have another problem (or the same problem again), they'll just call you over to fix it again.

In my experience it's less that people don't grasp it and more that they have no interest in learning and hope to survive as parasites forever. I've worked with people who will try to stop you from teaching them almost immediately and interrupt with some nonsense that amounts to "can you just do it for me, though?". A lot of the time this happens when the task is time-sensitive and they're likely afraid of missing a deadline by trying to figure something out themselves, but you'd think they would recognize the pattern after showing up with the same frantic plea enough times.

This doesn't scale well with the number of people who ask for help, unless you can organize a class - which is hard to do in a way that helps people when they need help.

I love talking about git workflow, and am happy to spend a half hour diagramming how your repo relates to origin, what branches mean, how pull requests and merges work, and what rebasing does. For people who don't yet grok git (or maybe just distributed source control?), this has proven to be very helpful.

I typically present this information about 2x a year. However, if I had people ask me for this kind of explanation every week, or multiple times a week, it would have a much larger impact on my productivity.

At least with Git there are _tons_ of ways to learn more. With Excel there are next to none because of the lack of developer community. There are few useful resources where someone can go to understand how they can best leverage their toolset.

Excel is also notoriously opaque when it comes to debugging, so there often are not useful questions to ask Google if you don't already know or understand what you are looking for.

Actually there are some bloody good books on the subject. The help files and online from MS help are not too bad.

Debugging: "excel debug a spreadsheet" - quite a few decent returns on page one and two. Related searches in Google gives some more hints.

A shameful secret: I firmly believe that the moment I became a programmer was when I discovered Debug.Print in VBA in some elderly version of Excel (97, probably) while bodging pretty charts together for someone to print and fax to someone else.

I'm willing to bet that I am not alone.

Don't be too hard on Excel - some of today's clueless spreadsheet monkeys will be real bona-fide developers in fifteen years.

Many zillions of years ago (OK about 23) I was taken on, fresh from the dole, by a factory that made pies (pasties, sausage rolls, pork pies etc (south west UK)) to do the whole IT thing. Anyway, apart from a few other handy skills I learned to bodge a pretty decent spreadsheet, building on experience starting with Super Calc.

I converted planning from Lotus 1-2-3 to MS Excel (for shame) and then with my smart Pentium 60 based machine, developed a nearly complete finite capacity planner for the factory - in Excel. The devil is of course in the detail but my labour plan and forecasts beat the planners most of the time - except at Easter and Christmas.

Today, I'm really not a developer 8) I grew up and became a sysadmin (oh and a managing director - but that's another story)

From memory help for the MS Office products was actually really good. You had sections that showed their object model in a very nice hierarchical manner and you could easily drill down to the individual methods of the objects mentioned. They also had a solid base object library across the Office applications. Things seemed to get more difficult with Office 2007 though, as compared to Office 2003 and earlier. With 2007 and later I believe you were supposed to use Visual Studio to extend it rather than using the inbuilt VBA. Also there was a lot of individual web pages describing how things were done and stackexchange questions answered for Excel and other Office products so it was pretty easy to get decent information to help you. The exception being when searching the internet the only answer to a question was that it was 'impossible to do' when actually it really wasn't, with the effect that most people reading the answer will do it the long and more error prone way.

Warning: This is from memory quite a while ago and it was a very minor part of stuff I did at my job then.

In my experience not 1 person in 50 of people who "aren't computer people" will retain that information regardless of how much time you spend. I once worked with a guy who would come to me for everything from excel stuff to "help I can't find this email in my gmail account". I tried to stress to him that I had my own work to do (write code) but he whined that it would take me just a minute and it might take him 15 or more! This had been going on at least 5 times a day for months and so finally I angrily asked him what I couldn't do faster than him out of his tasks and why shouldn't I just do his job and get his paycheck too. The requests slowed down after that. Being the one technical person available is almost always a shit experience.

Show him how to use Excel to make an invoice for your time he's wasting.

Savage. Wish I had thought of that.

Thanks! I didn't know about INDEX and MATCH, and VLOOKUP always bothered me.

So basically it's separation of concerns, but for people.

The old "Can you fix my laptop?"

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