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Let's face it: IT is the bureaucracy department of modern times which can keep itself 95% busy with self inflicted problems and has 5% service orientation. Proc

Let's face it: IT is the bureaucracy department of modern times which can keep itself 95% busy with self inflicted problems and has 5% service orientation. Processes are opaque for outsiders and typically not helpful. I really had to lough when I read the following description of the IBM BPM but this sums up a good part of the issue: "...while IBM BPM does come with a REST API, this REST API is borderline useless to Technology teams and SMEs Some REST calls use javascript encoded as strings Others require html embedded in json embedded in xml Database tables aren’t queried by name but by GUID. There’s no documentation of which GUID relates to which table/process.*" Quite a lot of things became so outragedly complex no one outside of the IT bothers to handle these, and sometimes not even inside IT. It started with AJAX where suddenly half of the development effort went into designing frontend code and backend services, which honestly does not even touch the end users automation problem. And it went further downhill afterwards. UIs nowadays look modern but are generally as user hostile as the technology stack used to produce these. In Excel my UI is just "there", I have a nice code generator aka as macro recorder, no IT department questioning my authorization to do something nor does not have time or budget to help me with my business problem. So VBA is the workaround for users around the IT department. Not perfect, but better than what you would get else.

tinus_hn 3y ago
So the answer is: Because it is the only programming language Corporate can’t choose not to install. The wonders of ‘Enterprise’, it amazes me when people bring it up as if it’s any kind of advantage or excuse.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  Huh? The parent clearly points out that it's much less effort and hassle to get an 80% solution. Who wouldn't want to spend a tiny fraction of the effort to get 80% of the outcome?
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Yes. But 90% of "effort and hassle" is dealing with IT department bullshit. Excel/VBA lets you sidestep that entirely.
dmurray 3y ago
There's a sentence in the article which says that this is an explicit policy decision of the company. > It is supposedly “Against the technology strategic vision of the company” to allow “end-users” access to high level programming languages.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  At this point it's not even explicit - it's an implicit decision of most companies, and even OSS projects, because it became part of the "common wisdom" of computing, part of the zeitgeist. This is where the idea of "a computer as a bicycle for the mind" died.
  - jstanley 3y ago
    On the topic of "computers as public transport for the mind"... A project I work on has some processes that I need to run that can only be initiated through the Azure DevOps Pipeline interface, and these need a "worker agent" on a VM or something, and there is only one worker agent, and some of the jobs take half an hour or more. So the effective outcome is that despite every member of the team having a full multi-tasking computer on our desk (A multi-tasking computer each! Sometimes more than one each! Plus loads of cloud VMs), we can only run a single task at a time between us and we have to coordinate scheduling manually. Is this the future? It is like this because the process involves "secrets" that are meant to be hidden from the team but are accessible to the program when running inside the Pipeline. If it weren't for this secret-hiding, I could just run the process manually on whatever computer I want. And the secret-hiding doesn't even really work, because I can freely commit code to personal branches on the repository that the Pipeline runs from, and I can run the Pipeline on whatever branch I want, so I could commit a program that prints out the secrets. Ah, but Microsoft has thought of this: if any of the secrets appears in the output, they get replaced with "***". (Let's skip the part where this accidentally leaks a "secret" username, where I know a particular piece of text that should be output but instead all I see is stars...) The secret-hiding doesn't work because I can just make the program output base64 of the secret. I don't do this because I don't want to start pasting secrets around in places they shouldn't be available, but it is sometimes tempting. Anyway, welcome to the future of computing. Thanks for listening to my TED talk.
j-a-a-p 3y ago
VBA is the ultimate agile programming language. The company's IT aka Bureaucracy Department is stuck with Scrum, Squads and what not. And meanwhile in the other departments people are just getting things done with Excel/VBA. Nothing has changed. In the last century this also happened and it was called islands of automation. In my bubble back then it was considered a good strategy, let departments first play around, and if they are on to something integrate it.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > In my bubble back then it was considered a good strategy, let departments first play around, and if they are on to something integrate it. Funny how with computerized process, IT departments are effectively central planners. The lowly workers get to only do what the IT secretariat allows. It is this way because national^Wcorporate security!
  - jojobas 3y ago
    It's not so much central planners deciding who can have what, but rather a natural monopoly. You don't want your water/electricity depend on a family-run shop that can just shut down, and neither you want your purchasing department to hinge on that guy from logistics who can just quit, leaving behind his magic incomprehensible spreadsheets.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      We decided that the water/electricity utility doesn't get to control how you use the amount you consume. Modern IT is more like if your water utility had final say over which faucet you installed and how you used it.
      - bee_rider 3y ago
        If you started using water in, like, industrial or agricultural quantities I guess the town would eventually get curious what is going on.
usrbinbash 3y ago
I can find bad examples of how things work in basically every department I chose if I look long enough. Are there IT-Managed things that border on insanity? Oh yes. Are these a good excuse to build a shadow IT? No, they are not. Don't get me wrong: I'm not bothered at all when a couple analysts get together and hack away at their own little tools in VBA. Kudos to them for getting into the spirit of things, and maybe they will understand my day to day better as a result. What does bother me, is when these analysts suddenly expect my systems architecture to somehow accomodate their private projects in whatever capacity. When I ask for documentation (there isn't any), an architectural overview (nope), or even access to the repo for that abomination (access to a what now?). Because, why shouldn't their spreadsheet inject data into my processing pipeline? Why shouldn't I write a controller that accomodates whatever tidbits of REST they bothered to watch half a youtube video about? When suddenly I get asked this in a meeting: "What do you mean we need authentication? Why does IT always have to make things so complicated?!?". So yeah, please, people should absolutely build their VBA, lowcode or whatever tools. I do the same thing, the only difference is, I call them shellscripts, and they live in git repo. But same as I don't let my CLI tools lose on the production server, I won't let it happen with things that have never even been through one code review.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  > or even access to the repo for that abomination (access to a what now?). Did someone give the analysts access to a repo? Because I'd hazard ~80% of the companies I've seen don't allow "non-development" users access to the corporate version control system.
  - usrbinbash 3y ago
    I'd be happy to put up a repo for them, if they ask. Problem is, they often don't. And not to make too big a deal out of it, but using github, gitlab or anything along these lines, is mostly free, not exactly rocket science, and private repos exist.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
TimTheTinker 3y ago
Someone needs to build a wasm interpreter in VBA. Then we can write programs in Go/Rust/etc and run them in office or wherever. VBA is to corporate environments what JavaScript is to the web.
- 4star3star 3y ago
  VBA can call executables, but I can see some places locking things down such that that would not fly.
- sancarn 3y ago
  Honestly, this is something I've been wanting to do for a while... Last I looked though, I couldn't find many good resources on how WASI (or the byte code) worked... And VBA being single threaded might make things difficult too... I have already built my own code interpreter in VBA to make Lambda syntax possible: https://github.com/sancarn/stdVBA/blob/master/src/stdLambda.cls https://github.com/sancarn/stdVBA/blob/master/src/stdLambda.... so I know it's definitely possible, just haven't figured out WASM yet...
jimbokun 3y ago
One of my first full time software engineering jobs was working on the trading floor of a bank, sitting next to the currency traders. I was hired by the head of Market Risk Management, whose job was to make sure the bank didn't lose too much money on any given day. He hired me because he did not trust the officially approved IT department to write the code to implement his algorithms. One example: they got something wrong because they did not understand mathematical precedence operations, like multiplication over addition. So one need was to get all the trades as input to the market risk calculations. This was early 2000s, and I installed Apache with Perl CGI on a PC under the desk, and created a little app for the traders to enter trades and track their positions. The traders started favoring this to the official IT solution because it was easier to use and see their positions. All of this to say, yes, figuring out how to bypass IT is an important function in a lot of corporate environments. And back to Excel: the traders used it for all of their calculations and simulations. We tried to work with them by giving them tools that plugged into Excel so they could leverage it along with what they were already doing.
- steve1977 3y ago
  Was also working in trading floor support (as IT) in the early 2000s. We actually even had proper Excel add-ins (programmed in C++) that provided special functions and also connected to backend systems as far as I remember.
- sancarn 3y ago
  > We tried to work with them by giving them tools that plugged into Excel This is probably one of the best ideas out there. If companies built a bunch of Excel Addins to leverage business systems, that would be revolutionary for many businesses.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

tinus_hn 3y ago

So the answer is: Because it is the only programming language Corporate can’t choose not to install. The wonders of ‘Enterprise’, it amazes me when people bring it up as if it’s any kind of advantage or excuse.

MichaelZuo 3y ago
Huh? The parent clearly points out that it's much less effort and hassle to get an 80% solution. Who wouldn't want to spend a tiny fraction of the effort to get 80% of the outcome?
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Yes. But 90% of "effort and hassle" is dealing with IT department bullshit. Excel/VBA lets you sidestep that entirely.

dmurray 3y ago

There's a sentence in the article which says that this is an explicit policy decision of the company. > It is supposedly “Against the technology strategic vision of the company” to allow “end-users” access to high level programming languages.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
At this point it's not even explicit - it's an implicit decision of most companies, and even OSS projects, because it became part of the "common wisdom" of computing, part of the zeitgeist. This is where the idea of "a computer as a bicycle for the mind" died.
- jstanley 3y ago
  On the topic of "computers as public transport for the mind"... A project I work on has some processes that I need to run that can only be initiated through the Azure DevOps Pipeline interface, and these need a "worker agent" on a VM or something, and there is only one worker agent, and some of the jobs take half an hour or more. So the effective outcome is that despite every member of the team having a full multi-tasking computer on our desk (A multi-tasking computer each! Sometimes more than one each! Plus loads of cloud VMs), we can only run a single task at a time between us and we have to coordinate scheduling manually. Is this the future? It is like this because the process involves "secrets" that are meant to be hidden from the team but are accessible to the program when running inside the Pipeline. If it weren't for this secret-hiding, I could just run the process manually on whatever computer I want. And the secret-hiding doesn't even really work, because I can freely commit code to personal branches on the repository that the Pipeline runs from, and I can run the Pipeline on whatever branch I want, so I could commit a program that prints out the secrets. Ah, but Microsoft has thought of this: if any of the secrets appears in the output, they get replaced with "***". (Let's skip the part where this accidentally leaks a "secret" username, where I know a particular piece of text that should be output but instead all I see is stars...) The secret-hiding doesn't work because I can just make the program output base64 of the secret. I don't do this because I don't want to start pasting secrets around in places they shouldn't be available, but it is sometimes tempting. Anyway, welcome to the future of computing. Thanks for listening to my TED talk.

j-a-a-p 3y ago

VBA is the ultimate agile programming language. The company's IT aka Bureaucracy Department is stuck with Scrum, Squads and what not. And meanwhile in the other departments people are just getting things done with Excel/VBA. Nothing has changed. In the last century this also happened and it was called islands of automation. In my bubble back then it was considered a good strategy, let departments first play around, and if they are on to something integrate it.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> In my bubble back then it was considered a good strategy, let departments first play around, and if they are on to something integrate it. Funny how with computerized process, IT departments are effectively central planners. The lowly workers get to only do what the IT secretariat allows. It is this way because national^Wcorporate security!
- jojobas 3y ago
  It's not so much central planners deciding who can have what, but rather a natural monopoly. You don't want your water/electricity depend on a family-run shop that can just shut down, and neither you want your purchasing department to hinge on that guy from logistics who can just quit, leaving behind his magic incomprehensible spreadsheets.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    We decided that the water/electricity utility doesn't get to control how you use the amount you consume. Modern IT is more like if your water utility had final say over which faucet you installed and how you used it.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      If you started using water in, like, industrial or agricultural quantities I guess the town would eventually get curious what is going on.

usrbinbash 3y ago

I can find bad examples of how things work in basically every department I chose if I look long enough. Are there IT-Managed things that border on insanity? Oh yes. Are these a good excuse to build a shadow IT? No, they are not. Don't get me wrong: I'm not bothered at all when a couple analysts get together and hack away at their own little tools in VBA. Kudos to them for getting into the spirit of things, and maybe they will understand my day to day better as a result. What does bother me, is when these analysts suddenly expect my systems architecture to somehow accomodate their private projects in whatever capacity. When I ask for documentation (there isn't any), an architectural overview (nope), or even access to the repo for that abomination (access to a what now?). Because, why shouldn't their spreadsheet inject data into my processing pipeline? Why shouldn't I write a controller that accomodates whatever tidbits of REST they bothered to watch half a youtube video about? When suddenly I get asked this in a meeting: "What do you mean we need authentication? Why does IT always have to make things so complicated?!?". So yeah, please, people should absolutely build their VBA, lowcode or whatever tools. I do the same thing, the only difference is, I call them shellscripts, and they live in git repo. But same as I don't let my CLI tools lose on the production server, I won't let it happen with things that have never even been through one code review.

ethbr1 3y ago
> or even access to the repo for that abomination (access to a what now?). Did someone give the analysts access to a repo? Because I'd hazard ~80% of the companies I've seen don't allow "non-development" users access to the corporate version control system.
- usrbinbash 3y ago
  I'd be happy to put up a repo for them, if they ask. Problem is, they often don't. And not to make too big a deal out of it, but using github, gitlab or anything along these lines, is mostly free, not exactly rocket science, and private repos exist.
  - ethbr1 3y ago

TimTheTinker 3y ago

Someone needs to build a wasm interpreter in VBA. Then we can write programs in Go/Rust/etc and run them in office or wherever. VBA is to corporate environments what JavaScript is to the web.

4star3star 3y ago
VBA can call executables, but I can see some places locking things down such that that would not fly.
sancarn 3y ago
Honestly, this is something I've been wanting to do for a while... Last I looked though, I couldn't find many good resources on how WASI (or the byte code) worked... And VBA being single threaded might make things difficult too... I have already built my own code interpreter in VBA to make Lambda syntax possible: https://github.com/sancarn/stdVBA/blob/master/src/stdLambda.cls https://github.com/sancarn/stdVBA/blob/master/src/stdLambda.... so I know it's definitely possible, just haven't figured out WASM yet...

jimbokun 3y ago

One of my first full time software engineering jobs was working on the trading floor of a bank, sitting next to the currency traders. I was hired by the head of Market Risk Management, whose job was to make sure the bank didn't lose too much money on any given day. He hired me because he did not trust the officially approved IT department to write the code to implement his algorithms. One example: they got something wrong because they did not understand mathematical precedence operations, like multiplication over addition. So one need was to get all the trades as input to the market risk calculations. This was early 2000s, and I installed Apache with Perl CGI on a PC under the desk, and created a little app for the traders to enter trades and track their positions. The traders started favoring this to the official IT solution because it was easier to use and see their positions. All of this to say, yes, figuring out how to bypass IT is an important function in a lot of corporate environments. And back to Excel: the traders used it for all of their calculations and simulations. We tried to work with them by giving them tools that plugged into Excel so they could leverage it along with what they were already doing.

steve1977 3y ago
Was also working in trading floor support (as IT) in the early 2000s. We actually even had proper Excel add-ins (programmed in C++) that provided special functions and also connected to backend systems as far as I remember.
sancarn 3y ago
> We tried to work with them by giving them tools that plugged into Excel This is probably one of the best ideas out there. If companies built a bunch of Excel Addins to leverage business systems, that would be revolutionary for many businesses.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]