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In 1998 my first job involved manually checking very large xl sheets for government cases to confirm that the math was right. If there are $s involved, someone
by flybrand 7y ago
In 1998 my first job involved manually checking very large xl sheets for government cases to confirm that the math was right.
If there are $s involved, someone will notice.
- tehlike 7y agoIt might be too late when they notice, though.
- jmkni 7y agoWas the maths ever wrong on the Excel spreadsheets? What was the cause when that happened?
- flybrand 7y agoYes - at that time there were two common errors that we would find about once per week that were known issues. (Can’t remember specifics - but we were thrilled when an old WSJ article noted them.) They were a combination of multiplication / exponential and some basic if-then statements. Easier items - where rounding resulted in paper errors were common.
- nwallin 7y agoThe fdiv bug in the Pentium x87 unit was discovered because someone was manually checking their Excel spreadsheets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug
- jmkni 7y agoWaow, nuts/interesting. Thanks
- papln 7y ago1998 is a bit late, but in the 1970s people commonly did this professionally as a fallback/verification for these newfabngled machines (and of course also there were similar jobs as the primary source of results in the age before machines). Those people's job roles were called "computer", before the machines took over the name.