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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

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.
      - ethbr1 3y ago
        Well, you'd still be paying for it. Authorizing use would be akin to the pre-Carterphone ATT model where only pre-approved uses would be allowed ('you can't attach your equipment to our network'). Thankfully, we eventually realized that was a dumb decision and moved to something closer to user freedom + network protects itself + zero trust. Better to just guide behavior at the pricing level, and let people make their own decisions about use.
        bee_rider 3y ago
        I think the analogy to water use just doesn’t work well. If we had to make some sort of water use analogy, I’d go with something like; the corporate network is a somewhat protected environment that needs to be maintained to be useful. So it it is more like a reservoir than a faucet. It would actually be OK for a couple people to go swimming and even pee in the reservoir. Some people could even boat in the reservoir, if they went out of their way to make sure that their boats are clean, safe, no pollution, etc. But lots of places just have a general “don’t go in the reservoir” rule. Not because a person would damage it, but because everybody doing it would. It is hard as a residential user to use enough water to damage the reservoir, but hypothetically if you managed to, somebody would check in. Even if you are paying, the town doesn’t want to run dry. If there is a drought, residential users might be asked to use less water. Price doesn’t work as a signal in corporate IT for individual workers, because it is expected that the company will “subsidize” the worker to the extent needed to do their job. If we want to make the analogy work—at least in some areas, landlords are required to provide water to their customers. In that case, you can use as much water as you want for free, but your landlord will get curious and might find some way to get you on the hook if you pass some reasonable threshold. You can also do some things as a user like dump toxic waste down your toilet. This would be sort of like running a publicly visible unpatched XP system on the network. It would damage the system, and why do you have that in the first place? Anyway, that was fun to write, but I don’t know that it is particularly useful. In order to make the analogy fit, we need to bring in as much complexity from the water management system as the IT system has.
    - jojobas 3y ago
      You can use as much water/power as the pipes/wires allow through, but you don't get to have petrol pipes, beer pipes or milkshake pipes laid to your property, neither you get to choose 160V DC or 430V 400Hz electricity, however useful all of these things are.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        > but you don't get to have petrol pipes, beer pipes or milkshake pipes laid to your property, neither you get to choose 160V DC or 430V 400Hz electricity Sure you can have all of these. They're just not offered as part of normal utilities. Nobody will care if you build yourself some, except maybe for petrol pipes due to fire/explosion risk.
        jojobas 3y ago
        Good luck getting you council to approve buried pipes from a brewery even 100m down the road. Within the confines of your parcel - maybe, so enjoy your Visual Builder for (beer) Aficionados.
  - 7952 3y ago
    Although those kind of questions around continuity happen across business. Sometimes the service you are offering depends on individual contact and flexibility rather than offering a commodity utility. And dependance on a small number of individuals is an acceptable and understood risk. The trouble with software is when managers don't understand that risk and offload it on another department when things go wrong.
  - xen2xen1 3y ago
    Oh dear God how many times I've had to support that.
sanitycheck 3y ago
I was talking about this with a friend the other week... I think what IT depts really need to do is let people go crazy with Excel/VBA, but write a script to monitor activity on xls files on the network over the long term. If there's an xls which has been in regular use for more than 18 months, and it contains macros, then it can be assumed it performs some important role and should be properly documented and checked and could also be rewritten in a "real" language and officially supported. Set up a meeting with whoever made it, and whoever's touched it most. Approach it more like "we're improving your cool thing" than "we're taking away your toys".
- arethuza 3y ago
  "let people go crazy with Excel/VBA" Many years ago a company I worked for used to send out a spreadsheet to its suppliers which they would complete with the products they offered and then when it was received back there was a button in the spreadsheet that would automatically upload the data to a central database. When I first saw this I was curious how it worked and did a bit of investigation - turns out there was VBA behind the button that established the database connection and uploaded the data. What was amusing was that the user had hardcoded the database connection string including username and password. Of course this wouldn't work outside of the firewall - but I'd be careful about letting people get too crazy.
  - bjornasm 3y ago
    I have this great new product called "DELETE FROM products WHERE provider != 'mycompany'"
    - xen2xen1 3y ago
      Little Bobby tables!
  - sancarn 3y ago
    To be honest, not hard coding a connection string is quite tough too. It really isn't an easy problem to solve. And especially when every piece of software out there connects to data in different ways. The reality of the situation is with proper IT support, there could be compiled Excel Addins which provide API connections to core systems such that proper authentication also takes place. But that requires a first step by IT. Either that or authentication via a web server to get a temporary connection string. Either way, it requires prior infrastructure.
culebron21 3y ago
You nailed it, haha! I had exactly the same experience: I was working in 2007 in analytics department, and we had no IT bureacracy, meanwhile the IT department, we had to deal with, would say it would need months of approval for anything substantial (like a simple dashboard or a report), and a year to implement.
j-a-a-p 3y ago
I was wondering what would be replacing Excel/VBA after 3 decades as a citizen developer alternative. I could not think of something that even comes close. Any ideas?
- specialist 3y ago
  I'm very optimistic about Project Jupyter style notebooks. I believe, without any evidence, that they have much greater potential thoughout IT, devops, whatever. Example: Imagine a CI/CD pipelines using notebooks. I hate Jenkins/Hudson style build systems so much I could just spit. I just want to run a shell script. (Alas, I haven't had the gumption to try this idea out yet. Soon.)
  - jampekka 3y ago
    Jupyter style notebooks are already becoming the next VBA in some fields. And this is not a good thing.
    - specialist 3y ago
      Why? The usual suspects? Lack of version control? Hard to deploy (reproducibly)?
      - jampekka 3y ago
        Yes and yes. But the larger and more fundamental problems are the mixing of the program logic and the state and inability to make the code composable or modular. Problems in version control and deployment/reproducibility almost necessarily follow from these. These are probably not impossible to solve for notebook-style, but there are not many efforts to solve them or they are not even acknowledged as problems. Edit: There is Pluto for Julia that attempts to solve the state-problem. I have not used it in practice though; I've given up on Julia, in large part because Julia community tends to be even actively hostile towards "stateless" development.
        3y ago

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.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      Well, you'd still be paying for it. Authorizing use would be akin to the pre-Carterphone ATT model where only pre-approved uses would be allowed ('you can't attach your equipment to our network'). Thankfully, we eventually realized that was a dumb decision and moved to something closer to user freedom + network protects itself + zero trust. Better to just guide behavior at the pricing level, and let people make their own decisions about use.
      - bee_rider 3y ago
        I think the analogy to water use just doesn’t work well. If we had to make some sort of water use analogy, I’d go with something like; the corporate network is a somewhat protected environment that needs to be maintained to be useful. So it it is more like a reservoir than a faucet. It would actually be OK for a couple people to go swimming and even pee in the reservoir. Some people could even boat in the reservoir, if they went out of their way to make sure that their boats are clean, safe, no pollution, etc. But lots of places just have a general “don’t go in the reservoir” rule. Not because a person would damage it, but because everybody doing it would. It is hard as a residential user to use enough water to damage the reservoir, but hypothetically if you managed to, somebody would check in. Even if you are paying, the town doesn’t want to run dry. If there is a drought, residential users might be asked to use less water. Price doesn’t work as a signal in corporate IT for individual workers, because it is expected that the company will “subsidize” the worker to the extent needed to do their job. If we want to make the analogy work—at least in some areas, landlords are required to provide water to their customers. In that case, you can use as much water as you want for free, but your landlord will get curious and might find some way to get you on the hook if you pass some reasonable threshold. You can also do some things as a user like dump toxic waste down your toilet. This would be sort of like running a publicly visible unpatched XP system on the network. It would damage the system, and why do you have that in the first place? Anyway, that was fun to write, but I don’t know that it is particularly useful. In order to make the analogy fit, we need to bring in as much complexity from the water management system as the IT system has.
  - jojobas 3y ago
    You can use as much water/power as the pipes/wires allow through, but you don't get to have petrol pipes, beer pipes or milkshake pipes laid to your property, neither you get to choose 160V DC or 430V 400Hz electricity, however useful all of these things are.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      > but you don't get to have petrol pipes, beer pipes or milkshake pipes laid to your property, neither you get to choose 160V DC or 430V 400Hz electricity Sure you can have all of these. They're just not offered as part of normal utilities. Nobody will care if you build yourself some, except maybe for petrol pipes due to fire/explosion risk.
      - jojobas 3y ago
        Good luck getting you council to approve buried pipes from a brewery even 100m down the road. Within the confines of your parcel - maybe, so enjoy your Visual Builder for (beer) Aficionados.
- 7952 3y ago
  Although those kind of questions around continuity happen across business. Sometimes the service you are offering depends on individual contact and flexibility rather than offering a commodity utility. And dependance on a small number of individuals is an acceptable and understood risk. The trouble with software is when managers don't understand that risk and offload it on another department when things go wrong.
- xen2xen1 3y ago
  Oh dear God how many times I've had to support that.

sanitycheck 3y ago

I was talking about this with a friend the other week... I think what IT depts really need to do is let people go crazy with Excel/VBA, but write a script to monitor activity on xls files on the network over the long term. If there's an xls which has been in regular use for more than 18 months, and it contains macros, then it can be assumed it performs some important role and should be properly documented and checked and could also be rewritten in a "real" language and officially supported. Set up a meeting with whoever made it, and whoever's touched it most. Approach it more like "we're improving your cool thing" than "we're taking away your toys".

arethuza 3y ago
"let people go crazy with Excel/VBA" Many years ago a company I worked for used to send out a spreadsheet to its suppliers which they would complete with the products they offered and then when it was received back there was a button in the spreadsheet that would automatically upload the data to a central database. When I first saw this I was curious how it worked and did a bit of investigation - turns out there was VBA behind the button that established the database connection and uploaded the data. What was amusing was that the user had hardcoded the database connection string including username and password. Of course this wouldn't work outside of the firewall - but I'd be careful about letting people get too crazy.
- bjornasm 3y ago
  I have this great new product called "DELETE FROM products WHERE provider != 'mycompany'"
  - xen2xen1 3y ago
    Little Bobby tables!
- sancarn 3y ago
  To be honest, not hard coding a connection string is quite tough too. It really isn't an easy problem to solve. And especially when every piece of software out there connects to data in different ways. The reality of the situation is with proper IT support, there could be compiled Excel Addins which provide API connections to core systems such that proper authentication also takes place. But that requires a first step by IT. Either that or authentication via a web server to get a temporary connection string. Either way, it requires prior infrastructure.

culebron21 3y ago

You nailed it, haha! I had exactly the same experience: I was working in 2007 in analytics department, and we had no IT bureacracy, meanwhile the IT department, we had to deal with, would say it would need months of approval for anything substantial (like a simple dashboard or a report), and a year to implement.

j-a-a-p 3y ago

I was wondering what would be replacing Excel/VBA after 3 decades as a citizen developer alternative. I could not think of something that even comes close. Any ideas?

specialist 3y ago
I'm very optimistic about Project Jupyter style notebooks. I believe, without any evidence, that they have much greater potential thoughout IT, devops, whatever. Example: Imagine a CI/CD pipelines using notebooks. I hate Jenkins/Hudson style build systems so much I could just spit. I just want to run a shell script. (Alas, I haven't had the gumption to try this idea out yet. Soon.)
- jampekka 3y ago
  Jupyter style notebooks are already becoming the next VBA in some fields. And this is not a good thing.
  - specialist 3y ago
    Why? The usual suspects? Lack of version control? Hard to deploy (reproducibly)?
    - jampekka 3y ago
      Yes and yes. But the larger and more fundamental problems are the mixing of the program logic and the state and inability to make the code composable or modular. Problems in version control and deployment/reproducibility almost necessarily follow from these. These are probably not impossible to solve for notebook-style, but there are not many efforts to solve them or they are not even acknowledged as problems. Edit: There is Pluto for Julia that attempts to solve the state-problem. I have not used it in practice though; I've given up on Julia, in large part because Julia community tends to be even actively hostile towards "stateless" development.
      - 3y ago