7 ms·

A Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet from Hell Slowed Williams' F1 Cars for Years

65 points by aloukissas 3y ago

timmorgan 3y ago
I was hoping for a floating point rounding bug in performance tuning or some such. This is just plain ol mis-management.
joezydeco 3y ago
Well, that was the bad news. The good news is that they're migrating to SAP.
- tomrod 3y ago
  That's not good news though.
  - esafak 3y ago
    I'm reasonably sure it's a joke.
    - joezydeco 3y ago
      If you know, you know. =)
rqtwteye 3y ago
I wouldn’t blame this on Excel. Williams was just grossly mismanaged for a long time. I have read some interviews with Vowles and it seems the management simply had no clue how to run an F1 team.
- willtemperley 3y ago
  Using Excel for this was a part of the mismanagement. Nothing wrong with Excel per se, used in the right context.
wideroots 3y ago
So the tool (in this case, Excel) was not the problem but it was the people using the tool. Cool.
croes 3y ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39789420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39789420
- justinclift 3y ago
  This submission seems to be getting traction though, whereas the other one isn't.
themerone 3y ago
Excel is a drug, and a lot of junkies have no interest in quitting. I actually work on software that has been used to manage the development of race cars. A couple sister departments use excel for everything my app does and are too set in the ways to consider anything else.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
vsskanth 3y ago
I work in Motorsports and a parts tracking database is an actual unsolved problem with each team building it's own bespoke solution. It's also kinda unique because your simulation tool is connected to the parts database and part of the tool has to work offline for running simulations in the plane. I'm not really a database person so never really understood why off the shelf solutions aren't typically used here. I'm guessing Williams probably just didn't have the budget to build one and didn't know any better so they used Excel.
- Jtsummers 3y ago
  It sounds like they were using the Excel spreadsheet for a WBS or scheduling application. There are a million and one COTS products for that. They probably used Excel because whoever did the initial task didn't know, or didn't have the time to learn about, tools like MS Project or whatever else that could have helped them, or only knew of larger scheduling tools that require a sys admin to set up and run. The reasons Excel gets used for anything: 1. It's present. 2. It's "free". (Corporate already paid for it.) 3. It's easy at the current scale of the problem 4. It doesn't require servers to use. 5. Someone else created it 20 years ago and no one pushed to use a real DB or specialized COTS product because that takes more effort. 6. It's actually an appropriate tool for the job (very common, but not the #1 reason it's used).
  - justinclift 3y ago
    > MS Project Heh, ~10 years ago that program used to be incredibly bad, losing information and getting getting things wrong. To the point where on some (larger) projects they'd have a separate project manager actually doing the work in a different system, but then update everything into MS Project every week just to comply with upper management directives. :/ Has it gotten any better?
    - Jtsummers 3y ago
      I used it most when you did. I found it acceptable, but not stellar. I never heard of it losing data. Most of the issues were with people not adapting to it and trying to make it work like the in-house tool it replaced (which was buggy, slow, and did lose data regularly). But yes, a lot of people didn't like it and just updated it from their separate spreadsheets or whatever on a weekly or monthly basis depending on when reports were generated.
riwsky 3y ago
I aspire to build software so despised as Excel. You either EOL a hero, or you sell upgrades enough to see yourself become the villain.
cjk2 3y ago
I’m not even surprised. I worked at a company whose bug tracking system was an excel spreadsheet mailed around. I’m not talking 2-3 engineers, I’m talking 250 engineers. There was one guy whose responsibility was to consolidate all the copies once a week. You can imagine how much information was lost there. I put JIRA in there because even that was less shit. Edit: also their VCS was a giant corrupted SourceSafe database as well.
- civilized 3y ago
  I'm going to look on the bright side of this. Look at how far we've progressed in collaboration! We complain about Jira etc but it does have a lot of great features that an emailed, weekly manually reconciled Excel spreadsheet does not.
  - casperc 3y ago
    I wonder, what is the current in-favor issue tracking tool if Jora is out?
    - Jakob 3y ago
      I like https://www.redmine.org/ https://www.redmine.org/. It’s stable, contains all features I expect from issue tracking, fast, easy to export and configure. And if you must, very easy to go into the code or database and change.
  - Jakob 3y ago
    That’s not apples to apples. You can host the spreadsheet online to solve the syncing issues. When doing that, Jira becomes much less advantageous. When things need to get done, I see people writing spreadsheets for fast adaptive tracking and then once they are done, they sync it with Jira manually post-factum just because they must. Jira becomes a tax to pay, and a slow centralised versioning system.
    - civilized 3y ago
      I agree that CRDT spreadsheets like Google Sheets have similar features, but we only got those recently as well.
kirkarg 3y ago
And why not adopting a CMMS system? I'm missing something? Of course that you need to pay for it, monthly or one time payment, but they are made for this kind of job
mdekkers 3y ago
Many years ago, I was sent in to, incidentally, a major car-parts reseller - almost all car parts in the EU and UK pass through this firm. This was a family business, dad had built the business, retired, and the kids were running the place. Pretty much the first order of business for the kids was the modernisation of the IT systems. My initial task was to do an assessment of who was using what, and what for, which all went really smooth, until we got to the “accounting floor”. I couldn’t get in, as the accounting team had locked the doors, and locked themselves in. Part of the modernisation was replacing the 100% Excel-based parts/accounts/supplier/customer ERP system with something that wasn’t Excel, and they simply weren’t having any of it. We walked away from that project, a competitor gleefully took it over, got caught in a swamp of technical and legal complications, and lost a lot of time, money, and people.
iancmceachern 3y ago
I've worked at places like this
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
WalterBright 3y ago
Excel is the world's most popular programming language, by far.
Jakob 3y ago
Nearly all spreadsheet replacement software is worse though: it’s seeming clarity comes from being overly rigid or overly difficult to configure. I don’t get the hate for spreadsheets. It has APIs, great primitives, good automation capabilities, im-/export, and is human-readable and writeable. This particular spreadsheet from the article might have gone bad, but for centrally tracking an 20,000 item list, a spreadsheet doesn’t seem to be completely out of place. To improve on it for a presumably very specialised use case with recurring changes and adaptive processes that might give you an edge over competitors, they probably need their own small development team. And this can of course go bad quickly too.
auselen 3y ago
I was expecting to read something like: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug
darkhorn 3y ago
They could have used Microsoft Access instead of Excel.
dang 3y ago
Recent and related: The details behind an F1 team's painful revolution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39776108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39776108 - March 2024 (8 comments)

65 points by aloukissas 3y ago

I was hoping for a floating point rounding bug in performance tuning or some such. This is just plain ol mis-management.

joezydeco 3y ago

Well, that was the bad news. The good news is that they're migrating to SAP.

tomrod 3y ago
That's not good news though.
- esafak 3y ago
  I'm reasonably sure it's a joke.
  - joezydeco 3y ago
    If you know, you know. =)

rqtwteye 3y ago

I wouldn’t blame this on Excel. Williams was just grossly mismanaged for a long time. I have read some interviews with Vowles and it seems the management simply had no clue how to run an F1 team.

willtemperley 3y ago
Using Excel for this was a part of the mismanagement. Nothing wrong with Excel per se, used in the right context.

wideroots 3y ago

So the tool (in this case, Excel) was not the problem but it was the people using the tool. Cool.

croes 3y ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39789420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39789420

justinclift 3y ago
This submission seems to be getting traction though, whereas the other one isn't.

themerone 3y ago

Excel is a drug, and a lot of junkies have no interest in quitting. I actually work on software that has been used to manage the development of race cars. A couple sister departments use excel for everything my app does and are too set in the ways to consider anything else.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

vsskanth 3y ago

I work in Motorsports and a parts tracking database is an actual unsolved problem with each team building it's own bespoke solution. It's also kinda unique because your simulation tool is connected to the parts database and part of the tool has to work offline for running simulations in the plane. I'm not really a database person so never really understood why off the shelf solutions aren't typically used here. I'm guessing Williams probably just didn't have the budget to build one and didn't know any better so they used Excel.

Jtsummers 3y ago
It sounds like they were using the Excel spreadsheet for a WBS or scheduling application. There are a million and one COTS products for that. They probably used Excel because whoever did the initial task didn't know, or didn't have the time to learn about, tools like MS Project or whatever else that could have helped them, or only knew of larger scheduling tools that require a sys admin to set up and run. The reasons Excel gets used for anything: 1. It's present. 2. It's "free". (Corporate already paid for it.) 3. It's easy at the current scale of the problem 4. It doesn't require servers to use. 5. Someone else created it 20 years ago and no one pushed to use a real DB or specialized COTS product because that takes more effort. 6. It's actually an appropriate tool for the job (very common, but not the #1 reason it's used).
- justinclift 3y ago
  > MS Project Heh, ~10 years ago that program used to be incredibly bad, losing information and getting getting things wrong. To the point where on some (larger) projects they'd have a separate project manager actually doing the work in a different system, but then update everything into MS Project every week just to comply with upper management directives. :/ Has it gotten any better?
  - Jtsummers 3y ago
    I used it most when you did. I found it acceptable, but not stellar. I never heard of it losing data. Most of the issues were with people not adapting to it and trying to make it work like the in-house tool it replaced (which was buggy, slow, and did lose data regularly). But yes, a lot of people didn't like it and just updated it from their separate spreadsheets or whatever on a weekly or monthly basis depending on when reports were generated.

riwsky 3y ago

I aspire to build software so despised as Excel. You either EOL a hero, or you sell upgrades enough to see yourself become the villain.

cjk2 3y ago

I’m not even surprised. I worked at a company whose bug tracking system was an excel spreadsheet mailed around. I’m not talking 2-3 engineers, I’m talking 250 engineers. There was one guy whose responsibility was to consolidate all the copies once a week. You can imagine how much information was lost there. I put JIRA in there because even that was less shit. Edit: also their VCS was a giant corrupted SourceSafe database as well.

civilized 3y ago
I'm going to look on the bright side of this. Look at how far we've progressed in collaboration! We complain about Jira etc but it does have a lot of great features that an emailed, weekly manually reconciled Excel spreadsheet does not.
- casperc 3y ago
  I wonder, what is the current in-favor issue tracking tool if Jora is out?
  - Jakob 3y ago
    I like https://www.redmine.org/ https://www.redmine.org/. It’s stable, contains all features I expect from issue tracking, fast, easy to export and configure. And if you must, very easy to go into the code or database and change.
- Jakob 3y ago
  That’s not apples to apples. You can host the spreadsheet online to solve the syncing issues. When doing that, Jira becomes much less advantageous. When things need to get done, I see people writing spreadsheets for fast adaptive tracking and then once they are done, they sync it with Jira manually post-factum just because they must. Jira becomes a tax to pay, and a slow centralised versioning system.
  - civilized 3y ago
    I agree that CRDT spreadsheets like Google Sheets have similar features, but we only got those recently as well.

kirkarg 3y ago

And why not adopting a CMMS system? I'm missing something? Of course that you need to pay for it, monthly or one time payment, but they are made for this kind of job

mdekkers 3y ago

Many years ago, I was sent in to, incidentally, a major car-parts reseller - almost all car parts in the EU and UK pass through this firm. This was a family business, dad had built the business, retired, and the kids were running the place. Pretty much the first order of business for the kids was the modernisation of the IT systems. My initial task was to do an assessment of who was using what, and what for, which all went really smooth, until we got to the “accounting floor”. I couldn’t get in, as the accounting team had locked the doors, and locked themselves in. Part of the modernisation was replacing the 100% Excel-based parts/accounts/supplier/customer ERP system with something that wasn’t Excel, and they simply weren’t having any of it. We walked away from that project, a competitor gleefully took it over, got caught in a swamp of technical and legal complications, and lost a lot of time, money, and people.

iancmceachern 3y ago

I've worked at places like this

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

WalterBright 3y ago

Excel is the world's most popular programming language, by far.

Jakob 3y ago

Nearly all spreadsheet replacement software is worse though: it’s seeming clarity comes from being overly rigid or overly difficult to configure. I don’t get the hate for spreadsheets. It has APIs, great primitives, good automation capabilities, im-/export, and is human-readable and writeable. This particular spreadsheet from the article might have gone bad, but for centrally tracking an 20,000 item list, a spreadsheet doesn’t seem to be completely out of place. To improve on it for a presumably very specialised use case with recurring changes and adaptive processes that might give you an edge over competitors, they probably need their own small development team. And this can of course go bad quickly too.

auselen 3y ago

I was expecting to read something like: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

darkhorn 3y ago

They could have used Microsoft Access instead of Excel.

dang 3y ago

Recent and related: The details behind an F1 team's painful revolution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39776108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39776108 - March 2024 (8 comments)