Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>I'm talking about things like actively losing track of customers because they were saved to a separate file that got saved over on a network share. I'm talking about billing people two or three times because there isn't a single place to check to see if they've already been billed. I'm talking about being on the phone with a customer service representative who can't authorize anything because your account is in an indeterminate state, and they have to check with management

Ah, those things weren't done by the kind of Excel-wielding people the article talks about.

Those mistakes were done by programmers proper. With CS degress and everything.

It's not the small mom & pop or mid-sized company that usually bills people two or three times -- those knew how to bill even before excel.

More often than not, it's the multi-million enterprise crap large corporations use, with 400 options and convoluted procedures. I mean I've been double billed by the utility (electricity) company, and that's surely not due to the bill being in any Excel file.

I think you'll find that 'large corporations' are awash in Excel monstrosities.

I've worked at a few unnamed places, medium to huge, that used Excel and Access in horrifying ways. One place, with 60000 employees, had an 'editing cone' which was an actual traffic cone that you had to have in your cube if you were writing to the Access file on the SMB drive. During my time there, one person ran their Excel script sans cone and a bunch of people didn't have to pay their bill that month.

One place, with 60000 employees, had an 'editing cone' which was an actual traffic cone that you had to have in your cube if you were writing to the Access file on the SMB drive

I LOVE this image. Acquiring a physical lock on the file. Think of the manager who thought of this beautiful idea, probably not a programmer by training. Awesome.

And yes, since it relies on human conformance, it's bound to fail on occasion. You can say the same thing about any piece of software you ever came across or wrote.

I can't work right now, Tim has the cone.

(this was a pretty great idea from the manager though)

Not in my experience; those were all real cases I mentioned, with real people using combinations of Excel, Access, and SMB shares to "simulate" having actual software talking to an actual database. Usually, in fact, right beside the actual software that talks to an actual database--because someone figured they'd throw something together to hold "an item or two of ancillary data" instead of getting that software modified to include that data--and then their ancillary data-store grew and grew...

At least one regional electric utility uses an Excel macro to scrape its own public web site to gather aggregate usage and price data. This method allows them to save the data, and maybe analyze it later.

Just... absorb that for a few seconds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com