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The explanation as to why spreadsheets can be so bad is spot on. It's because of these reasons that porting a spreadsheet to a proper app is a thing. I've been

The explanation as to why spreadsheets can be so bad is spot on. It's because of these reasons that porting a spreadsheet to a proper app is a thing. I've been tasked of doing just that and it's horrible. We're supposed to rejoice and hail the spreadsheets gods because a spreadsheet can take unstructured data and create a map of (key,value) where key is a value appearing in one column and where value is the sum (for example) of the values appearing in another column for that key. We literally have a simple mapping like that, call it a "pivot table", and it's supposed to be some achievement of mankind. I beg to differ. From what I've seen I'm pretty sure the world runs on broken spreadsheets, with bogus numbers being presented during meetings, used for decisions (including political decisions), etc. At some point management realizes the company (or institution) has been taking nonsensical decisions since years and it's not only a minefield of bugs and near impossible to debug "code" (that'd be the "I've certainly spent more time than I want to admit trying to untangle one of those bowls of spaghetti trying to find out why a certain number is computed the way it is." from TFA, which any of us ever having been tasked to port a spreadhseet to an app know all too well)... But it's also a minefield politically: you cannot ask too many questions or point out too many bugs because it exposes the brokenness everything has been running on since years. Even though somewhere, at some level, people knew everything was FUBARed (otherwise the decision to rewrite the spreadsheet to a dedicated app would not have been taken), it's a minefield. You have to walk on eggs to not piss anyone. My epitath may be: "The world runs on broken spreadsheets".

wruza 3y ago
Spreadsheets play a huge role at early stages of any complex business. Almost no early stage business has a budget and competence for maintaining a dev team capable of producing working code at its rate of change. When it does, we call it “a software startup”. Success rate is still questionable, so people call these investments “venture”. People create spreadsheet messes not because they are stupid or lazy. They do what everyone else itt would deem impossible: create and evolve a mostly working system as needed while doing their regular job. I’ve helped to migrate both excel-based and software-based enterprises. Few factories on foxpro/clipper, a couple of realties and one leasing on excel. There’s no real difference in how much gray hair you get in the process. Pretty sure if some company came to ours with what we see in TFA and asked us to help with migration, we’d laugh for a week straight.
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> But it's also a minefield politically: you cannot ask too many questions or point out too many bugs because it exposes the brokenness everything has been running on since years. > Even though somewhere, at some level, people knew everything was FUBARed (otherwise the decision to rewrite the spreadsheet to a dedicated app would not have been taken), it's a minefield. You have to walk on eggs to not piss anyone. Your argumentation implicitly makes use of the assumption that the respective person scores high on agreeableness: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits There exist people who do not mind pissing other people off ... ;-)

wruza 3y ago

Spreadsheets play a huge role at early stages of any complex business. Almost no early stage business has a budget and competence for maintaining a dev team capable of producing working code at its rate of change. When it does, we call it “a software startup”. Success rate is still questionable, so people call these investments “venture”. People create spreadsheet messes not because they are stupid or lazy. They do what everyone else itt would deem impossible: create and evolve a mostly working system as needed while doing their regular job. I’ve helped to migrate both excel-based and software-based enterprises. Few factories on foxpro/clipper, a couple of realties and one leasing on excel. There’s no real difference in how much gray hair you get in the process. Pretty sure if some company came to ours with what we see in TFA and asked us to help with migration, we’d laugh for a week straight.

aleph_minus_one 3y ago

> But it's also a minefield politically: you cannot ask too many questions or point out too many bugs because it exposes the brokenness everything has been running on since years. > Even though somewhere, at some level, people knew everything was FUBARed (otherwise the decision to rewrite the spreadsheet to a dedicated app would not have been taken), it's a minefield. You have to walk on eggs to not piss anyone. Your argumentation implicitly makes use of the assumption that the respective person scores high on agreeableness: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits There exist people who do not mind pissing other people off ... ;-)