Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Not to mention, the entire financial industry

That IS the dumpster fire. Trust me, the reason I know is that I used to be that guy who thought Excel was a great tool.

I built derivatives spreadsheets, backoffice spreadsheets, trading systems with realtime data, all sorts of crap in Excel.

Really, it's Stockholm Syndrome. People who previously had zero computing power at their disposal think they've found the hammer that solves all problems when they're introduced to Excel, because now they can calculate lots of numbers.

They just get blinded by the revelation that they can now calculate "anything" and are happy to pay whatever the cost is in terms of future maintenance, ease of understanding, etc.

> Excel not being idiot-proof doesn't mean it's not usable.

This is absolutely true, I'd be able to do much better with Excel now than earlier. The problem is Dunning Krueger. There are too many people who think they can code once they're able to get a bit of Excel going, and they don't know that they can't. Not trying to be condescending, I've been there myself. It's just that you get a lot of "coding is a thing I have to do in order to get to some target", and so people think that once they've finally bashed out their spreadsheet, they've figured it all out.

You bring up some very good points. But to those, I have a question: what is the alternative? Both now (for UK healthcare), and in general?

The "people who previously had zero computing power at their disposal" may be wrong in thinking "they've found the hammer that solves all problems" - but there's literally no other hammer available for them. They're not programmers, they won't write their own software (nor would they be allowed to). Any other option involves so much organizational overhead - both initial and ongoing - that it's a non-starter.

I agree that people routinely use Excel way beyond their own skills. But I haven't heard of any viable alternative.

Grovel to Google or MSFT or whatever big name tech firm to borrow their coders.

They already have the infrastructure.

They have loads of coders sitting at home, not completely utilized. (Dunno how true it is, but a lot of people here comment that.)

They've already written programs to do something similar.

They're well aware of side issues like data protection, security, cross-platform, etc.

They could use the goodwill.

Wasn't Google already involved somewhere? Surely they can figure out how to count some tests as well.

I suppose if you're clueless you'll think Accenture or Capita are the same as Google, so yeah maybe we are screwed.

The alternative is to pay professionals to do it for them.

The alternative is to stop using your house wrench to fix the pipes and call a real plumber.

Excel is an excellent hammer. A spreadsheet is a system to develop pure functional graphs and to interact with them in real time. I spent lots of time on finance spreadsheets myself and also thought it was Stockholm syndrome, but when I transitioned to working on software I came to see exactly why spreadsheets are entrenched the way they are, enjoy seeing them used creatively, and would never wish bespoke software on finance people. And good for them, they seem to know better, themselves!

One part is knowing how important correctness actually is in your case. A lot of people on HN are perfectionists, and there's a lot of rhetoric going around our industry about avoiding errors and not breaking things; in reality business processes have always had to be error tolerant (because until recently they were always done by humans) and a quick solution that breaks sometimes is often more valuable than a slow solution that doesn't break.

Another piece is pervasive auditability. Any result should come with an explanation of where it came from; "Bob did some calculations in his head and he reckons the answer is 7" would be acceptable for some kinds of business decisions, while for others it needs to be more like "Bob followed the procedure specified in the XZY institute handbook, page 456". Somehow we've let all that go out the window, partly because people who don't understand computing are managing organisations that deeply depend on it. But you don't even really need computer literacy; what you do need is the same kind of scepticism that you'd apply to any other piece of work.

Managers need to manage. Some of the problem is just people lacking the necessary skills (and a lot of that goes all the way to the top: the UK government doesn't have the wherewithal to hire skilled computer professionals because at every level the people on top don't have the skills to assess whether the people below them are any good), but a lot is a misplaced perception of computers as infallible.

> It's just that you get a lot of "coding is a thing I have to do in order to get to some target", and so people think that once they've finally bashed out their spreadsheet, they've figured it all out.

I have a friend who wrote a 641-line long bash script to automate a web site. It doesn't use subroutines anywhere, the body for the program is a 550 line long loop with multiple if statements and loops inside it.

He thinks the program is maintainable and easy to understand because he didn't have particular difficulty writing it.

Wha......

What??

What school or book did he read that made him think that was a good idea?

Could be worse. Could be a 641 line perl script.

Could be worse. Could be a one line Perl script.

He attended the school of self-reliance. He should be applauded for tackling the challenge and doing the job himself, where otherwise it would likely have not been done at all.

Obviously, he's not a programmer. The script, for us, is bad. Perhaps if something important for him depends on this script working, he should pay a software developer to spend some time cleaning it up.

> He should be applauded for tackling the challenge and doing the job himself

Indeed. it was a hobby project of his.

He's entirely self taught. He's not stupid or anything, it's just that he hasn't had the experience of maintaining large codebases, attempting to modify his unmaintainable code or attempting to modify other people's unmaintainable code.

Well why are these people wrong? You had a thing going but you didn’t complete the thought: if Excel works and they can now calculate “anything” without developing software and deploying containers, where is Stockholm Syndrome? Why are they blind? What should they use in finance? Jupyter notebooks?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com