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Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

Nearly right. I don't think many sales and finance people have that kind of authority either. That's why you see everyone using the company tools or free tiers. You need to sell to peoples bosses. Save time, make projects more transparent, take away freedom, that sort of thing.

This is probably why Excel is so ubiquitous. Also that Excel is the most powerful tool that Corporate IT will let you have. Try and get Corporate IT to let you have WSL on your machine if you work in sales or Finance. That is probably why web apps are so popular. Corporate IT have to know about it to block you. A marketing manager can probably put Basecamp on her credit card, but it would be a huge job to get anything self hosted last IT with their policy of 'we are in charge of the computers and we will decide how you run your business'.

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Excel is ubiquitous because literally anyone can use it. Unlike a database, there is a direct visual representation of what you’re building. It is included in all m365 licenses and has been relatively cheap for a perpetual license for years.

As for allowing WSL for sales, have you ever actually worked with someone in sales? At 99% of companies, even the most technically literate sales person can just barely send an email attachment without help. What exactly do you think they’re going to do with WSL??

In a lot of companies, web sits under marketing...

Yes I have been on the senior management team of several companies and have worked with sales. Your lazy stereotype is as bad a suggesting programmers all sit in dark rooms with starwars T shirts and Body Odour issues.

I have seen sales people create very complex excel models, and use low code tools to build their own pipelines because corporate IT were too pig ignorant to help them. I have seen them use screen recorders to beat the lack of API access. Ihave seen finance people use WSL, Cygwin, Python, Anaconda and more.

> because corporate IT were too pig ignorant to help them

Is corporate IT the issue here, or is it that companies aren’t setup in a way for random teams to dedicate time to build and support things for other random teams? The people in corp IT have jobs and deliverables, and none of them are building tools for the sales team.

I wouldn’t expect corp IT to build things for the sales team, anymore than I’d expect the sales team to help corp IT with selling a tool they want to upper management or the rest of the company.

If the sales team needs internal tools, then they need a dedicated dev team to work on those tools. Short of that, they will be stuck doing it themselves with whatever skill sets happen to be on the team at the time.

In my experience, this is not just an issue with the business vs IT. Even within IT, if a team of sys admins needs some tools, they will have to cobble something together the best they can, because there isn’t another team that will do it for them. Once or twice I see where a team with some skills needs some work and starts making offers to help other teams… one team ends up taking all their cycles, then down the road, it’s realized they don’t have a “real” role at the company, so the whole team is laid off, then the team still using their tools is left scrambling to find a replacement that can be supported.

IT is a cost center so management geduces their budget as much as they think they dare. When IT struggles to afford a good backu, system they can't afford to figure how to support whatever tool will help you.

> Yes I have been on the senior management team of several companies and have worked with sales. Your lazy stereotype is as bad a suggesting programmers all sit in dark rooms with starwars T shirts and Body Odour issues.

And I’ve been in sales directly for over a decade, not “management that works with sales”. It’s not a lazy stereotype which anyone who has been directly involved would tell you. There are a very, very small number of technical folks that make the jump from SE to sales and retain their technical abilities, but the vast majority of successful sales people are borderline tech illiterate.

Excel is so ubiquitous because it is the only IDE/Programming Language/Database Environment business users can run in a restricted corporate IT environment.

And the self service coding platforms I have seen provided by corporate IT are wonderfully inadequate and useless. Corporate IT looks at the average business user who admittedly can't code even if their life depended on it and thinks "that's my client". Except that 99% of the end user automation is done by the 5th percentile of business users (the "spreadsheet monkey" of the team, I was proudly one!), those are their real client, and they are way more sophisticated, and that's only increasing as kids pretty much all get exposed to coding in school and college.

>Excel is ubiquitous because literally anyone can use it. Unlike a database, there is a direct visual representation of what you’re building.

Oh no. Excel includes an entire programming language, namely VBA macros and if you give it to engineers they will use it. The reason Excel is ubiquitous is because it is Microsoft and someone is paying. The same is true for Matlab. A company getting Matlab licenses is much, much easier than someone getting a python installation.

It isn't a money problem. It is an Anti-Money prolem. If you can't pay someone you can't use it.

Pretty much. Companies won't approve buying an individual book, but they will approve a subscription to a learning platform.

It's too much work to approve all these random purchases, but if you don't review them, you end up paying for a bunch of unused subscriptions all over the place as well as people buying a ton of stuff that doesn't really benefit the company that much.

A learning platform that costs the same as a book per month per employee, and doesn’t have the book on it.

You weren't listening. It's one platform, which means that the guy that costs the company $200K annually who approves expenditures wasn't overworked and could eliminate a bunch of waste across twenty teams.

I mean sure, a cynical person might ask why even bother paying that guy when his salary could be divided up into $10K per team for a hundred books a year per team, but that kind of talk gets you dragged in front of HR for a "discussion".

Back in the day at Hughes Aircraft, and later, at least for a while, at Boeing, we had a "Library", though which anyone could request a book. If the library did not have it, they would purchase a copy, and "loan" it to the requestor indefinitely. If another request for the same book came in, the original requestor would be asked to "return" it to the library. The library also maintained subscriptions to all relevant technical journals and standards publications.

This system was awesome because book purchases did not require management approval, so there were no denials and little delay involved.

My experience is that while sales can have good tools at department level, they do not have a lot of buying power

However it looks like marketing people have a lot of buying power, probably since their job involves buying a lot of random things.

Even as a boss getting tools approved can be a hassle to sell to higher ups. 80/mo per user is practically free compared to payroll but is aways a hurdle.

> a huge job to get anything self hosted last IT with their policy of 'we are in charge of the computers and we will decide how you run your business'

... because we are also in charge of:

- the bills for the servers/networks/storage to "self host" your new shiny application

- the installation/upgrade/administration/support of the servers/networks... and of your application (because the finance department doesn't know how to do it)

- the integration of your "self hosted" application into the AD (for the SSO), mail system, slack, backup/restore system (in case of crash or hack)... and the maintenance of all of it

- eventually ensure that the application datas can be exported to other apps or migrated (when the new shiny self hosted app will be less new... and a new new new shiny self hosted app will be bought)

- the cybersecurity of your "self hosted" application... and of the whole corporate IT !!!!! Remember: a single application is enough to compromise the whole corp IT (OK... it can be segmented, 0-trusted, and so... be it increase attack surface and cybersecurity cost anyway)

In fact: BUYING a "self hosted" application is the EASY part, the HARD part is to make it RUN, DAY-TO-DAY, for AS LONG AS REQUIRED for the business (including legal requirements sometimes to keep datas for long time)

OK, when "local IT" ask for application, they usually can manage part of it technically but... either they wont (because they just dont have time! Remember: they want the tools to do their job, but the tool is NOT their job) or they cant (because they're devs and not admin sys/net sys and they dont know)

At most: they can use some "sandbox" unconnected to "corp IT", but then they either need to forget all nice things (like backup systems or AD) or to implement it and maintain it (shadow IT)...

IMHO, that's part of the explanation for the "SaaS" and "Cloud" development: externalizing all of these costs

All of which is true. I used to run a smallish IT team. The problem comes with the failure to offer an alternative to solve the issue the person has.

My algorithm always started with, can we do this with our existing O365 licence. You can't have Trello or Asana, because we have Planner already. You can't have Slack because we have Teams. You can have Basecamp because the manager put a great case of why She couldn't do that on Teams. You can't have Jira because you only want bug tracking and it is too complex for your little team, how about self-hosted Redmine?

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