Hacker News Reader

Comment by konjin | Hacker News Reader

Having worked in the financial industry, my first job was writing a system to cover for a $10m fuck up in excel where yahoo exchange rates stopped updating and the same spreadsheet was used for a few weeks until someone noticed "Shit, we're losing a lot of money here.".

Excel is the right solution in the same way playdoh is a valid building material.

View on HN

Seems seems there were at least a couple of problems here. Why were financial professionals using Yahoo as a source of exchange rates?

Because excel couldn't authenticate into our internal server and it was good enough.

Was it good enough? I would argue that if it enabled your firm to make $12M before being the proximate cause of losing $10M, and the alternative was "we don't win $12M nor lose $10M because we can't afford the project" then I agree it was good enough.

No, which is why I was hired to replace it.

Okay, so you write a script to take the data from your internal server and post it somewhere that Excel can access. You don't use Yahoo.

How about don't use excel in the first place?

Oh, I completely agree. That was one of the "couple of problems" in my initial reply!

Pretty common for finance in the 00s and 10s to be honest. It's slowly getting better, but until you fire everyone who isn't on board with this and replace them with people who can at least script - at every level of the business - you're going to have the same problem.

That would be good. But to be honest, Excel is scripting - in a 2D FRP REPL (something structurally more advanced than most programmers are using day to day). If we're changing hiring requirements to test for bash/Python/Powershell competency, why not actually test for Excel competency?

Maybe that's the problem? Excel is so easy to start with that people with no experience think they've mastered it, and the industry doesn't seem to have specified any best practices, much less testing the interviewees for their knowledge of them.

Programming language expressions represent arbitrary trees, which are strictly more powerful than finite dimensional tables.

Still a very long way from that. What tools should non-programmers use instead?

You'd be surprised at how common that was. I've known two other financial orgs that scraped Yahoo as a critical part of their investment system...

I know individuals / hobbyists who do this, which is fine. Financial orgs should know better, especially if it is actually "critical." How did this get through any sort of review? How do you know Yahoo is authoritative?

That assumes there is a review to get through, rather than it being an Excel file with a few hundred macros...

Hobbyists are usually more diligent than professionals because they care. If anyone cared about the product it wouldn't have been a spreadsheet.

>>Excel is the right solution in the same way playdoh is a valid building material.

I sooo badly want that on a T-Shirt.....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com