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I generally am very critical of my own gang ( programmers ) for being so into their own bubble they completely lose perspective of the real World, and with that

I generally am very critical of my own gang ( programmers ) for being so into their own bubble they completely lose perspective of the real World, and with that ignorance comes the usual arrogance. But this time I feel we should give the business to the geneticists. The Excel "problem" is known and has been known for a long time, finance guys and policy makers were maybe the first big ones to "discover" this for slightly different reasons. Then WHY on Earth these top professionals, elites, "creme de la creme" people continue on this path? And it's not like they love Excel, quite the contrary. Yes, the main reason is they are not programmers so they need to find a way to hack something to solve their problem. The problem with their "problem" solving is they are being slobs in a work that requires the EXACT opposite. "Oh now we need to hire a programmer too?" - Yes, you do. "But we don't have the budget for it" - Yes, you do. You see, money is never enough for anything, it's a question of priorities and when you blow millions of dollars with fancy experiments to ruin your career because of Excel, maybe that Python/R/Julia guy was a bargain after all. I know some of these people, and under the aura of lab coats and distinguished professors it's just some guy/gal trying to crank that paper ASAP to keep the hamster wheel spinning AND they are being sloppy about the data and process AND most of them know it. Sorry, but no excuses.

breakfastduck 5y ago
Yeah. They use poor/ unsuitable tooling known for unusual data quirks with absolutely no effort to look at alternatives or pay for an expert. No sympathy from me. Embarrassing. I certainly wouldn't get away with such negligence at my workplace.
Closi 5y ago
The underlying assumption here is that when transferred into R or Julia, with an equivalent level of development effort and testing, that there will be no/fewer bugs. I'm not entirely sure that's true. I think we are comparing something that is knocked out in an hour in excel to someone spending 4-10x of the time doing it in Python / Julia, but I don't think that's a like-for-like comparison.

breakfastduck 5y ago

Yeah. They use poor/ unsuitable tooling known for unusual data quirks with absolutely no effort to look at alternatives or pay for an expert. No sympathy from me. Embarrassing. I certainly wouldn't get away with such negligence at my workplace.

Closi 5y ago

The underlying assumption here is that when transferred into R or Julia, with an equivalent level of development effort and testing, that there will be no/fewer bugs. I'm not entirely sure that's true. I think we are comparing something that is knocked out in an hour in excel to someone spending 4-10x of the time doing it in Python / Julia, but I don't think that's a like-for-like comparison.