Hacker News Reader

Comment by mruts | Hacker News Reader

I worked at a financial services company that created portfolio analytics software. My job pretty much consisted of turning our analysts' excel models into high performance Scala code.

The company wasn't very successful, we just couldn't convince portfolio managers to pay for our software. Even the analysts at hedge funds didn't like to use our software. My theory is that a bunch of analysts need to justify their jobs with incredibly inefficient and error-prone excel workflows. Our software would have eliminated a lot of what they do in a day, and therefore, would eliminate their jobs as well.

It is terrifying that trillions of dollars of assets are run on excel, but the inertia is too strong.

View on HN

> My theory is that a bunch of analysts need to justify their jobs with incredibly inefficient and error-prone excel workflows.

Even if you're right, pretty much any company whose customers aren't 100%, unimpeachably good is going to fail.

Another way of thinking of it is, as soon as they became even slightly an antagonist (think Disney rivals, less Autobots), it was doomed.

As an aside, an alternative interpretation would be that Excel workflows are more intellectually stimulating, so as a side effect they come up with better models. So even if your software had a superior UX for the task at hand, the objective of making money is better served by people using their brains harder generally.

After all, a lot of people practice violin and play chess because it feels good, and then those people make a bajillion dollars on the stock market. Consider that if Excel even remotely reenacts the patterns of those activities, which is almost certainly does, it makes money in ways besides calculating numbers in a user-accessible way.

I think your last paragraph is really spot on. Being an expert at excel makes you feel like a wizard, just like how emacs or vi or the bloomberg terminal makes you feel.

Our software didn’t have that feeling, it didn’t make you feel powerful in the same way that excel does (I lobbied hard for us to make a desktop app, no one likes how web apps feel. But nobody listened)

Excel also gives people the comfort that they can track what goes in and out and adjust easily.

Giving up that control is hard.

I don't think it's the fear of losing jobs, it's more because of the flexibility it offers. There's a lot of adhoc adjustments / corrections to data / formulas that require a lot of flexibility and a coded program won't be able to manage it that well. I used to do a lot of my stuff with vba but in the end I would still use excel formulas when I could

No, it would be terrifying that trillions of dollars are run by programmers. If the hedge fund guy says that Excel is fine, then Excel is fine.

Principal number one; don’t overcomplicate yourself. Keep it simple, stupid

Well considering their terrible returns net of fees and the massive outflows into passive, I think it's about time the industry did some soul-searching.

I have a humorous thought. Maybe it's that excel models require humans to run. The code and data is way messier and it's partially locked up in the heads of the people running the sheets. It's harder to copy, so it's harder to steal.

One cyber-breach and all that really nice clean code is readily understandable to your competitors.

Sounds about right to me! One of the companies I consulted for had a billing department that insisted people pay their utility bills by check. They said "this is the way most of our customers like to pay".

But what they really wanted to say is "we will have to repurpose 200 staff who process these checks and mail out statements, and they're all 30 year veterans, and I don't have the heart to tell them they're fired even though they are the sole reason we lose money"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com