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Comment by twistedpair | Hacker News Reader

I used to work for Deutsche Bank. All financially modeling ran through Excel, though admittedly a massive C++ library that is a big Excel macro plugin. These sheets get massive and there are a few clusters of blades that do nothing but run Excel macros day and night.

But why is this madness? It works for them. The iBanking world is the madness. You can put in place effective change controls and auditing with any system. However, if people just want it done and don't care how, regardless of whether these calculations were in Python, Mathematica or Fortran, garbage in will still be garbage out. So, let's not wantonly scapegoat Excel for a process problem here.

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Coincidentally, so did I.

I agree with you 100%. iBankers use Excel because it does what they want. One of the main reasons I left was because I got tired of trying to re-invent the excel wheel with every piece of software. There was always an inherent lack of trust that any UI was "doing it properly," so we always had to add the failsafe of export to CSV so people could do it themselves in Excel. Mind-boggling inefficiency.

The value of export is beyond just checking on UI.

If they can expert it to Excel, then they can do whatever simple data analysis they just made up. No reason to wait for IT to implement whatever stats they are curious about, order it in some new way or whatever. Doing those things in excel is very fast and they get to have complete control over it.

Even if they only color cells and rows depending on some ad-hoc rule that will never be used again, excel still added them a lot of value.

Plus, I would pay gold for users that actually test system before relying on it. There is always shortage of testers and if the customer would do some of it, he deserves a discount.

I don't disagree. The problem is that people are error prone, and excel doesn't value check. We had to build large BPM-driven processes in order to account for this. Also I don't want to imply that users got to test the system while it was being built. That would imply that there was a logical product development process in place, which for most projects, there wasn't. Users got something that had been frankensteined over the course of the project, and muckity-mucks wondered why projects and applications went stagnant because users stopped using them and went back to excel.

There is actually a business reason why this is the case. The general assumption in most investment banks is that either the market or the regulations will change so quickly that by the time you've written software the "right" way, either the market or the government has already moved on. Excel lets you move fast, and make changes quickly, even if it results in a bloated mess later on. Like you say, Excel isn't the issue, it's the nature of the business.

I would still expect that with their profit margins they would all have come up with custom solutions by now.

They all do in varying degrees - e.g. Goldman's Slang/SecDB -and are investing in well-engineered valuation/risk systems that work across various trading units due to regulatory pressures as well as to reduce manpower/maintenance costs.

You make Excel sound like the true agile way to do software.

I like how people use tools for their own good and then blame them solely for everything going wrong. The least people using spreadsheet should have done is have a form of background check not using spreadsheet to check if their data is near correct value.

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