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And I've cleaned up after many, many shitty engineers, one example being engineers who want to use a sledge hammer to drive a finishing nail and again, that's j
by gxs 6y ago
And I've cleaned up after many, many shitty engineers, one example being engineers who want to use a sledge hammer to drive a finishing nail and again, that's just one example.
And if you want to get personal to that level they all the same know it all personality who think they write MUCH better code than they actually do.
Pretty sure they cost companies even more money.
Luckily for me, I have the practical sense to know when to use what tool and so far it's worked out just fine. I wouldn’t use excel where not appropriate, so kindly don’t make assumptions.
But more power to you, keep shitting on tools that are more sophisticated than you probably think.
People who half know excel are the worse, they are the ones who know it just well enough to think it doesn't work at all.
Custom solutions are great - but aren't always the answer and with proper process Excel will work just fine in many use cases that you might not expect.
I could blab on about this forever, because, you know, there is a lot of gray area or whatever.
- konjin 6y agoImagine asking people to use the custom solution sledge hammer of python, git, unit tests and sqlite. Not one off the shelf piece of software there. There comes a point where using a spork to drill holes in walls is not the right solution. That you're shitting on people pointing out the obvious tells me you're still stuck in the 90s windows developer mindset.
- gxs 6y agoThe problem is you only hear about botched excel jobs - you never hear about all the successful projects, so when you hear a horror story you just jump to the conclusion excel sucks. Ok, ask a geneticist to build what they need with their “off the shelf” parts you mentioned vs 90% of the time being self sufficient with excel and allowing them to, you know, do genetics work. (The other 10 percent being where it makes sense to build something more custom). Reminds me of the classic HN post when Dropbox had just launched where the user exclaimed “this is just a mounted blah blah using subversion blah anyone can do it” (paraphrased) That old Dropbox post summarizes this mindset quite well. And if being practical with your head not in the clouds making sane business AND technical decisions is what the 90s were like, man I missed out. I guess at the end of the day we’re arguing over where you draw the line regarding when to stop using excel and graduate to something different, a blurry line that at the end of the day is a judgement call. Oh and for the record I wasn’t even arguing against or for this particular use case in this post - speaking more in general terms.
- konjin 6y agoI worked with a couple. They stop being geneticists rather quickly because the salary for someone who can use python well is about 4 times that of someone working on genes. Keeping them away from coding is now an executive decision since university departments can't pay competitive salaries. The dropbox post was right. Knowing someone who wins a lottery is no reason to conclude spending all your money on lottery tickets is a good investment. Which is as much as I said in that thread when it happened. That they were solving a problem for idiots comes with the problem that idiots are too stupid to realize when a problem is solved, so you need to focus on looking like you've solved it instead. Funnily enough dropbox spent herculean amounts of effort on polishing the UI. >And if being practical with my head not in the clouds making sane business AND technical decisions is what the 90s were like, man I missed out. Spoken like someone who has done neither.
- gxs 6y ago>> The dropbox post was right Enough said.