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Comment by replyifuagree | Hacker News Reader

One thing to watch out for is confusing IT work for dev work. I see this a lot with business folks.

An example of IT work is installing MS Office on a laptop by hand.

An example of dev work is integrating VBA into excel so that office users can automate excel using VBA.

But yeah thats kinda my point. Integrating VBA into excel isn’t the Manhattan Project. Unless it’s your first job you can probably break the project down into steps and give a decent estimate of time on each.

Yep, this sounds like the kind of project you make a guess, write up, and it works in that amount of time on your machine.

Then you push it out into the field and you get flooded with calls on it not working. Turns out it only works in your version of Excel on Windows without some particular set of patches installed. Manhattan Project was easy, they didn't have to worry about any backwards/multi-platform compatibility.

lol, I'm just thinking of how awful the Manhattan project would have turned out if it had half the invisible things that can go wrong in software deployments.

If software caused mushroom clouds each time it had a problem in the field, nobody would let MBAs run software projects!

Exactly, I’m glad you’re on my side with this. It’s great to have your support.

Integrating VBA into excel was an interesting one as the excel team refused to just pull it in as a dynamic dependency but wanted it embedded straight into the deployment to avoid the DLL hell that was common on the windows platform. In addition going from having no automation via something like VBA to having automation required some pretty complex work.

As for the Manhattan Project, you might want to think on the difference between the words complexity and difficulty. And then you might consider that when working with nuclear material to create the world's first nuclear bomb, you would want to keep the complexity as low as possible, sheerly out of self preservation.

Neat!

Hell, business types confuse data entry work for dev work.

It's Computer Stuff. It's all the same.

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