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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

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??

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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 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.

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.

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

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