Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle

(there are also a number of HN commentators who are reliably noisily wrong about things, but not in such a blatant way that they get obliterated in downvotes, and one of them started that top level thread)

Yes? I thought this is common knowledge.

Here's a universal tool whose potential is limited only by one's imagination, and yet most of the jobs in our profession are at best boring - the high-paying ones usually involve making actively harmful things that shouldn't exist in the first place (see e.g. whole adtech for starters), and most of the rest are so mired in office politics or business constraints that the outcomes are guaranteed to be shit. A lot of strangeness in the dev culture can be viewed as coping mechanisms.

Meanwhile, after doing this work long enough, you end up realizing that disturbingly many SaaS tools offer much less utility and worse ergonomics than an Excel spreadsheet.

IMO the arguments people make in frontend are similar to the infinite scaling requirements in back end that require 10X overpriced machine rental.

Whether or not the current site could ever be appropriate for all 10 billion users, a developer wants the universal skills tuned to the top end.

A university HR employee OTOH probably realizes they won't code themselves if they end up at the largest employer on Earth.

Major differences let you say "well that's just what THOSE people do". It's not a threat to your sense of self.

Minor differences challenge your own sense of self, and thus must be destroyed.

The biggest issue they had was not understanding that the data from one area (Wales) was in a different format from the others - an integer that represented rank (lowest being best) rather than a test score - that would probably still not been noticed if they'd used something else.

They are usually looking at numbers to support decisions, not much for actual guidance/directions.

Yup. That's a lesson in how robust organizational systems are - the errors mostly get compensated for somewhere downstream, so visibly bad outcomes are rare.

> If you've ever been tasked to rewrite a semi-advanced Excel spreadsheet to a dedicated (web)app, you know.

Yeah, I know. I've worked in a place that tried and failed to beat an Excel plugin with a web app.

The thing is, in my experience, you'll have a team spend two years doing the rewrite - with a lot of that going into designing and then building complex web frontend using modern tech stack - and in the end, you'll get a dedicated application that has less functionality and worse ergonomics than the spreadsheet you tried to replace.

The timeframes and costs involved with getting a Proper Software Development Team to build you a Proper App For That are absurd, and are only getting worse with everyone wanting to do bespoke web SPAs using modern practices and tool stacks. Even if one could afford that, the outcome is unlikely to be better for actual users. And so Excel stays, covering for all the processes that are custom enough that there is no ready-made popular Enterprise SaaS on the market that management can order people to use instead.

This is faulty logic. Human error isn't an exceptional thing, it's extremely common and expected. There's an entire field of study dedicated to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_reliability

In many scenarios the right thing to do is just accept the error risk - as humans, we often don't need perfect execution but i don't think this is one of those.

The person quoted in the article gets it right: "We need senior management that know what they're doing, who realize that this is not, and never was, the way to run an HR system"

This is true. Sounds like they have cobbled together a system using Excel because thats why you have to do when processes change all the time.

The alternative is to find a 'proper' HR system to handle all the weird custom processes which is a massive three year project that costs tens of millions and then probably fails to deliver.

IT people complain about people cobbling things together in Excel but in the short and medium term thats usually the only way for people to get shit done

But yes management dropped the ball and should have had some checks and balances. No-one realised that every candidate from Wales got rejected? Thats a clanger.

I agree the practices described don't sound strange - they sound normal, but so does the resulting errors that occurred - also par for the course.

I broadly agree with this, but there are ways to make the process effective and ways to make it incredibly error prone, like not having checks to ensure you paste into the correct columns. Obviously there are no such checks here.

They also blam Oriel which is another system