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In my line of work I often see tech vendors and consultants trying to plan infrastructure changes using Excel (or worse, tables in Word, but we won't go into th
by tominous 10y ago
In my line of work I often see tech vendors and consultants trying to plan infrastructure changes using Excel (or worse, tables in Word, but we won't go into that). The results are horrendous.
They start with a manual inventory of the configuration in question, type it ad-hoc into a spreadsheet, then go through making manual changes, notes and additions until it feels good. There's lots of highlighting, different coloured text, etc like layers of sedimentation. Formulas are only used for sums and counts in an ad-hoc way.
The end plan always contains mistakes and omissions that really hurt during deployment time.
The correct way requires discipline: immutable input sheets (from machine-generated config dumps), a parameter sheet, output tables (with consistent usage of formulas with "$" notation to lock rows and columns), and cross checks with conditional highlighting.
Unfortunately this is really hard for people without programming instincts/experience. Good job security I guess. But if you can do it, it's both faster and safer than the manual free-form method.
- vehementi 10y ago> They start with a manual inventory of the configuration in question, type it ad-hoc into a spreadsheet, then go through making manual changes, notes and additions until it feels good. There's lots of highlighting, different coloured text, etc like layers of sedimentation. Formulas are only used for sums and counts in an ad-hoc way. Oh man that hits home hard. And all the sums and counts are in random cells "beside" the tables right?
- pjmlp 10y agoWorse, try putting all the user stories and bug reports into Jira or similar tools only to have managers request to duplicate it and have email ping-pong about project status with Excel sheets as attachments. Or place those Excel sheets on Sharepoint.
- cm2187 10y agoIn my line of work I see an organisation regularly burning $50m in IT budget for developping a software that is completely flawed, horribly designed, not fit for purpose, though take years to develop and for that amount of efforts and money, could be much more efficiently done in Excel for 1/10000th of the cost! This week I am trying to extract data from a data cube that was created for reporting. Problem, the cube was designed so that only one node can be retrieved at a time, and so if I need a bulk retrieval, which I need, it needs to be queried a billion times, sinking the server, timing out the queries, taking hours. The IT team is trying to figure out a way to run an overnight job so that it sinks the server during quiet hours. Basically these guys designed a vault where you can only add data but never retrieve it. They should be fired. [edit] and before someone starts to think "yeah but this is big data", the underlying populated numbers in this cube would fit in a 5MB spreadsheet. I am not sure that the audience of hacker news realises how terrible is the reputation of IT and developers in large companies from the business side. They are seen as a world of hyper-bureaucratic, common sense-free, business sense-hostile, half-assed lemmings. Excel is not great but one has to have a hard look at the alternative.
- user5994461 10y ago> how terrible is the reputation of IT and developers in large companies from the business side. They are seen as a world of hyper-bureaucratic, common sense-free, business sense-hostile, half-assed lemmings. Large non-tech hyper-bureaucratic common-sense-free companies are especially hostile toward good IT and dev so good people just don't work there ;) [and even if they did, they still couldn't get anything done]
- pb8226 10y agoThis is exactly the truth. The environments are suffocating and good people are only moderately more productive and don't stick around long.
- cm2187 10y agoSomehow IT manages to be an order of magnitude more bureaucratic than the rest of the company. Perhaps a case of IT people trying to be more catholic than the pope in a bureaucratic company!
- flukus 10y ago> I am not sure that the audience of hacker news realises how terrible is the reputation of IT and developers in large companies from the business side. They are seen as a world of hyper-bureaucratic, common sense-free, business sense-hostile, half-assed lemmings. Usually decisions like building a $50m application aren't made by devs but by clueless managers. I do agree with the sentiment though, I see a lot of wheels reinvented everywhere I look. Recently I had to deal with a scheduler and a file remover/archive that were built in house. God know how many hours were wasted on this but the whole thing would work better as a batch script and a scheduled task.
- cm2187 10y agoI agree that there are often absurd requirement on the business side, just because they don't understand the tech and the problems a minor feature in their mind will cause down the line. That's where project managers/change people are supposed to help, acting as an intermediary, understanding both the tech and the business. But in my experience they usually understand neither the tech nor the business and are adding more confusion, the whole thing works better without them. But the state of corporate IT is sad to look at. I work in a large organisation where one of the executives was telling us proudly at a townhall that we have more developers than Facebook and Google together (though we are in the financial sector). Well, to say the least, we have little to show for it. Nothing works properly. Our core systems still run on programs written decades ago and we have to pull people from retirement if, after having exhausted all other possible options, we have to make a minor change. The network drives have a top speed of 1MB/s, and hang sometimes for minutes. As for the business applications. Any minor change results in ETA in months if not years and multi-millions quotes. I remember discussing with some devs about an Excel VBA addin they were taking over from the business. They re-wrote most of the features in .net, which is very good, but somehow half of their application was still written in VBA, and I mean tons of VBA. I wondered why. They told me the library they were using only allowed to expose a function to Excel, but not to hook to or manipulate the UI. So they have written a VBA wrapper around all of their features that calls the .net excel functions. There was a long silence after I showed them how they can get a handle to the COM interface of Excel in a single line of .net code using that library.
- astrobe_ 10y agoSpreadsheets put together two aspects: - data (raw and calculated) - presentation The original mistake is that both were made interdependent. Excel tries to fix that the hard way by introducing various reference modes, a lot of "do what I mean" magic and even nested spreadsheets/databases (aka "tables"). But it still leads to scary bugs, as the video shows: if you do things the wrong way the numbers you derive from your data are wrong and you don't even see it if you don't pay attention. While watching the video I was wondering if all those features were brilliant or insane. The answer to me is that it's insanity. If nothing else, HTML has shown for a long time already how one can - one should - make the content (data, programming) separate from the presentation. This idea has to be back-ported to spreadsheets now. The first half of the video is really just keyboard and drag'n'drop tips, while the second half is really just brutal hardcore programming: "match", "if", "lookup", references, indirections, "debug mode", ... Acknowledge that spreadsheet documents really are programs. Make a spreadsheet DSL then apply ideas from Lighttable to make it as "visual" and "easy" as possible.
- unixhero 10y agoThank you for the tidbit! Picked up a few things here :)
- harperlee 10y agoBut the problem you point to seems more related with the process than with the technology, right? In any case, there is this Excel alternative, Resolver One, which has what I believe it is a killer feature: you can expose the Excel sheet as a web server. (With Excel, you would need to have a Sharepoint server for that, I believe). That way any user can iterate a lot on an initial excel sheet but then their group can just work with the web version as an "immutable structure" sheet, and if a change needs to be done, you don't need to go and contact someone with appropriate permissions to upload a new version to the server, etc.