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One of my current client is a big institution whose decisions affect the life of probably 700+ millions people a year. A lot of critical processes are just exc
by BiteCode_dev 4y ago
One of my current client is a big institution whose decisions affect the life of probably 700+ millions people a year.
A lot of critical processes are just excel sheets that people open and run once in a while, maybe copy / paste or click a button in there, then close.
Some processes are automatized, but there is no way to check if the result is good. Best you can do is to have a human look at the numbers and say "LGTM" with some confident face and call it a day.
Said client handle billions of euros every year for other entities. They basically influence the entire world economy on a daily basis.
Now, get audited from top to bottom, from internal and external teams, and all audits pass eventually. I met mostly good people there that take their job seriously. But still, every time I dive deeper into their rabbit whole, I just can't believe what humanity stands on.
- acid__ 4y agoOnce upon a time, all of that would have been managed on just pen and paper, calculated by humans instead of machines!
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoThere was one French artist that made a comic with 2 characters once, saying: - computers are amazing, they can calculate 20 millions operation every second, with only one mistake every 10 million of operations - 2 mistakes a second, you call that progress? Today, the fun part is, the human unreliability is now a small part of a big automated chain that have large, numerous and instant results. So if the excel file is not opened, and the calculations updated but the human, the rest of the system will work with stale values. And who knows what it will do to the cascade of events handling the billions of euros? In fact, my client has a failsafe for that: a designated chain of people that are supposed to take over if one cannot do their task, for each critical task.