4 ms·

Have you every worked in a large enterprise? I have personally tested an Excel based credit rating tool, to be rolled-out globally by a major financial institu

by pintxo 6y ago

Have you every worked in a large enterprise? I have personally tested an Excel based credit rating tool, to be rolled-out globally by a major financial institution. The fact that one should not do this, is by no means a reason not to do it.

sails 6y ago
Would be interested in hearing more about that Excel tool.
- akho 6y ago
  Come work at a bank. Any bank.
  - strangeattractr 6y ago
    Can attest to this. Some of the things I've seen excel spreadsheets contorted to do horrify me. I once got spreadsheet dumped on me to debug because it wasn't working. A colleague used the spreadsheet to 'generate' interest rates that were then input into a mainframe. Dug into the VBA spaghetti mess, turns out this 15 year old script that took 15 minutes to run originally hit a bunch of Oracle/External APIs and performed calculations was now just copying the rates in from a csv file on a shared drive. The error was caused by an excel formula ticking over a new year causing it to look for a directory it did not need to access that didn't exist. I thought it was pretty funny until I heard that the entire asset finance business had been unable to write any loans for days because of this.
- pintxo 6y ago
  It started very innocent: Some consulting company apparently was tasked to create a prototype of the credit rating algorithm. Quite appropriately, I would say, they did so in Excel. As you can easily tweak the logic, show input, intermediate results and output. And all can be manipulated by the client who does not need to know a thing about programming to do so. Great. From there it went downhill: Apparently someone up the hierarchy thought "Wow, that's 80% of what we need, let's just add a little UI and ship it" They added a UI, but not as a VBA UI as you might hope. No, they did the whole UI in different worksheets. Storing any intermediate data ... also on worksheets. Long story short, it was a mess, and a slow one for that. Oh, did I say this was a multi-lingual application? Production rollout was on Jan 2nd, Dec 31st around 4pm I found a bug in the other language, on the one machine which had the this language configured. I believe this was the only time I ever saw a programmer literally run down the office to that machine to debug this issue.
nicoburns 6y ago
I once created a very modern mobile offline-capable web app for a large enterprise company that was powered by APIs backed by excel. Luckily we didn't have to deal with those directly, but it was a bit of a pain for the poor guy doing th backend.
nullsense 6y ago
Fun fact: Toshiba has software that generates entire CRUD app skeletons driven 100% by excel spreadsheets. You fill out object definitions in excel spreadsheets with property names and data types etc. It's like an extremely uncool long lost cousin of rails -g Source: Got one of their engineers to show me after I heard about it and had to know if it was real. Anyone who's ever worked with or in Japan knows just how far they are willing to torture Excel spreadsheets to get them to do anything and everything.
- chasd00 6y ago
  to play devil's advocate, i had a desktop support job in college and worked with an executive assistance. She was _very_ attractive and so i was at her desk "working on the printer" a lot, she knew Excel better than anyone i've ever seen (before or since). It was like watching a magician. In the right hands Excel is pretty amazing.
- pintxo 6y ago
  I've (miss)used excel as a web-service testing platform once. The test data (input/expected output) was anyway in the Excel sheet, so why not. We did not have other software available at the time, so Excel+VBA it is. It was one of my nicest testing gigs ever. A test session would take only minutes, all results documented to the t. And fiddling around with the test data was so easy. Would be interesting to know if this thing is still in use. Not sure the customer liked it that much, I regression tested the 6 previous - still running - versions of the service, something no one had cared to do for years. We found bugs both in the Spec and in the Code for nearly all old versions...
  - nullsense 6y ago
    >I've (miss)used excel as a web-service testing platform once. The test data (input/expected output) was anyway in the Excel sheet, so why not. We did not have other software available at the time, so Excel+VBA it is. That's an upgrade on how Toshiba did testing. They did basically the same thing except it was Excel+Humans. No joke. Never saw that one with my own eyes but a coworker did. He also said they had doctors there and each doctor was responsible for X number of staff and every so often made them fill out a questionnaire of which the final question was "have you thought about killing yourself lately?" and if you answered yes you got a day off. Apparently people would ask for transfers to different offices where the doctor responsible for them wasn't physically present, so they could avoid even being asked the question for fear of being made to take time off work. One of the more senior guys on the project kinda just disappeared too. Fun times.

by pintxo 6y ago

sails 6y ago

Would be interested in hearing more about that Excel tool.

akho 6y ago
Come work at a bank. Any bank.
- strangeattractr 6y ago
  Can attest to this. Some of the things I've seen excel spreadsheets contorted to do horrify me. I once got spreadsheet dumped on me to debug because it wasn't working. A colleague used the spreadsheet to 'generate' interest rates that were then input into a mainframe. Dug into the VBA spaghetti mess, turns out this 15 year old script that took 15 minutes to run originally hit a bunch of Oracle/External APIs and performed calculations was now just copying the rates in from a csv file on a shared drive. The error was caused by an excel formula ticking over a new year causing it to look for a directory it did not need to access that didn't exist. I thought it was pretty funny until I heard that the entire asset finance business had been unable to write any loans for days because of this.
pintxo 6y ago
It started very innocent: Some consulting company apparently was tasked to create a prototype of the credit rating algorithm. Quite appropriately, I would say, they did so in Excel. As you can easily tweak the logic, show input, intermediate results and output. And all can be manipulated by the client who does not need to know a thing about programming to do so. Great. From there it went downhill: Apparently someone up the hierarchy thought "Wow, that's 80% of what we need, let's just add a little UI and ship it" They added a UI, but not as a VBA UI as you might hope. No, they did the whole UI in different worksheets. Storing any intermediate data ... also on worksheets. Long story short, it was a mess, and a slow one for that. Oh, did I say this was a multi-lingual application? Production rollout was on Jan 2nd, Dec 31st around 4pm I found a bug in the other language, on the one machine which had the this language configured. I believe this was the only time I ever saw a programmer literally run down the office to that machine to debug this issue.

nicoburns 6y ago

I once created a very modern mobile offline-capable web app for a large enterprise company that was powered by APIs backed by excel. Luckily we didn't have to deal with those directly, but it was a bit of a pain for the poor guy doing th backend.

nullsense 6y ago

Fun fact: Toshiba has software that generates entire CRUD app skeletons driven 100% by excel spreadsheets. You fill out object definitions in excel spreadsheets with property names and data types etc. It's like an extremely uncool long lost cousin of rails -g Source: Got one of their engineers to show me after I heard about it and had to know if it was real. Anyone who's ever worked with or in Japan knows just how far they are willing to torture Excel spreadsheets to get them to do anything and everything.

chasd00 6y ago
to play devil's advocate, i had a desktop support job in college and worked with an executive assistance. She was _very_ attractive and so i was at her desk "working on the printer" a lot, she knew Excel better than anyone i've ever seen (before or since). It was like watching a magician. In the right hands Excel is pretty amazing.
pintxo 6y ago
I've (miss)used excel as a web-service testing platform once. The test data (input/expected output) was anyway in the Excel sheet, so why not. We did not have other software available at the time, so Excel+VBA it is. It was one of my nicest testing gigs ever. A test session would take only minutes, all results documented to the t. And fiddling around with the test data was so easy. Would be interesting to know if this thing is still in use. Not sure the customer liked it that much, I regression tested the 6 previous - still running - versions of the service, something no one had cared to do for years. We found bugs both in the Spec and in the Code for nearly all old versions...
- nullsense 6y ago
  >I've (miss)used excel as a web-service testing platform once. The test data (input/expected output) was anyway in the Excel sheet, so why not. We did not have other software available at the time, so Excel+VBA it is. That's an upgrade on how Toshiba did testing. They did basically the same thing except it was Excel+Humans. No joke. Never saw that one with my own eyes but a coworker did. He also said they had doctors there and each doctor was responsible for X number of staff and every so often made them fill out a questionnaire of which the final question was "have you thought about killing yourself lately?" and if you answered yes you got a day off. Apparently people would ask for transfers to different offices where the doctor responsible for them wasn't physically present, so they could avoid even being asked the question for fear of being made to take time off work. One of the more senior guys on the project kinda just disappeared too. Fun times.