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Not just financial institutions either: I've worked for two global manufacturing businesses – in very different industries – where fundamental parts of their da
by lukezaparaniuk 10y ago
Not just financial institutions either: I've worked for two global manufacturing businesses – in very different industries – where fundamental parts of their day-to-day operations were dependent on Excel spreadsheets and Access databases.
I would absolutely echo all your points, especially the rationale behind "real software": it would have been far more expensive, have taken far longer to be delivered, and that's if it were even signed off in the first place. When management sees "real software" as wholly unnecessary and all you have is Excel, you soon learn to be rather creative.
- jventura 10y agoMy experience as well! Once I was contacted by a friend who works on the QA department of a factory (belonging to a multinational company) to implement a system to keep track of the building process (what was soldered, who did it, what tolerances it must have, things like that). The factory's process was entirely modeled in Excel spreadsheets, with the caveat that they took almost 6 months to gather and deliver the data to the client after installing the product on the client site. As it was a freelancing job, I gave them a very high hourly rate, such that it they could forget about it, as it was too much work for one person alone. But in hindsight, I also refused because most certainly it would imply that a lot of the workers in that departament would be made redundant (there were 30 workers there, I would say that at least half would be unnecessary after the system was up and running). If only management understood the huge savings that would be possible.. But in this case, I'm glad they don't!