5 ms·

A spreadsheet can mostly be maintained by the next person to come along. More complex systems often die when the person who knew them leaves. Plus all that st

A spreadsheet can mostly be maintained by the next person to come along. More complex systems often die when the person who knew them leaves. Plus all that stuff about crappy IT departments who don't act as if they exist to serve the actual purpose of the business.

arethuza 10y ago
"A spreadsheet can mostly be maintained by the next person to come along." I do note that you say "mostly" - but I've seen truly epic spreadsheets (including one that my employer at the time spent almost £1 million on) and I'd rather reverse engineer an application with source code rather than a complex spreadsheet (even though the feature in Excel to show dependencies visually is rather cool).
cm2187 10y ago
I have seen enough legacy applications, applications so old no one understand how they work or dares to touch them, or for which we need to pull developers from retirement, software running only on old mainframes, to take the key man risk with business-developed software too seriously. Same thing with reliability. So many of these IT supported applications that are supposed to survive a nuclear strike are down a day a week, while the basic access database pretty much hasn't seen a downtime during business hours since inception.
- ellius 10y ago
  I think to this point, the organizations that will really succeed in the future are the ones who aggressively hire people with a strong cross of building simple, usable and understandable technical tools who also understand business logic and can communicate. I think soon people will be able get further with some basic R/Python and the ability to write a good email than many of the more technically skilled workers without those abilities.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    To tease out a little more from yours and parent's comments, I think a few things are drastically undervalued by traditional programmers. Tactical initiative: not just for Marines. The closer software is being built to a person who actually posseses the domain knowledge, the less risk of misunderstood requirements / behavior there is. Readability: a language that requires six months to learn to read but expresses programs in half the length is often times not the right choice. If a good enough language can be read by someone with a week of training, and 90% of the domain knowledge is possessed by people who don't know the better knowledge, then use the good-enough language. Reasons like these are why Excel / VBA is used. And moreover, why it (paradoxically to us) works.

arethuza 10y ago

"A spreadsheet can mostly be maintained by the next person to come along." I do note that you say "mostly" - but I've seen truly epic spreadsheets (including one that my employer at the time spent almost £1 million on) and I'd rather reverse engineer an application with source code rather than a complex spreadsheet (even though the feature in Excel to show dependencies visually is rather cool).

cm2187 10y ago

I have seen enough legacy applications, applications so old no one understand how they work or dares to touch them, or for which we need to pull developers from retirement, software running only on old mainframes, to take the key man risk with business-developed software too seriously. Same thing with reliability. So many of these IT supported applications that are supposed to survive a nuclear strike are down a day a week, while the basic access database pretty much hasn't seen a downtime during business hours since inception.

ellius 10y ago
I think to this point, the organizations that will really succeed in the future are the ones who aggressively hire people with a strong cross of building simple, usable and understandable technical tools who also understand business logic and can communicate. I think soon people will be able get further with some basic R/Python and the ability to write a good email than many of the more technically skilled workers without those abilities.
- ethbro 10y ago
  To tease out a little more from yours and parent's comments, I think a few things are drastically undervalued by traditional programmers. Tactical initiative: not just for Marines. The closer software is being built to a person who actually posseses the domain knowledge, the less risk of misunderstood requirements / behavior there is. Readability: a language that requires six months to learn to read but expresses programs in half the length is often times not the right choice. If a good enough language can be read by someone with a week of training, and 90% of the domain knowledge is possessed by people who don't know the better knowledge, then use the good-enough language. Reasons like these are why Excel / VBA is used. And moreover, why it (paradoxically to us) works.