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Exactly. When a process is important enough and repeated often enough, it will move into a more formal system. But most of the time spent running a business is

Exactly. When a process is important enough and repeated often enough, it will move into a more formal system. But most of the time spent running a business is at the fringes of what has been automated and formalized, and this isn't an accident—the automated processes are there precisely because they reduce or eliminate the human time. That means most of the humans (outside of front-line customer support or similar) tend to be working on stuff that is substantially less well-defined than what OP is imagining. Which again gets to my point about the weird perspective on business that we have as software developers. We're called in exclusively to work on those parts of the business that are deemed sufficiently repetitive to be worth automating. That dramatically skews our perception of what running the business should look like.

oneplane 2y ago
That's great, but has little to do with the 'excel is my hammer, therefore everything is an excel-shaped nail' problem. Sure, like I wrote (twice already), you might need to have some malleable rows in front of you on your local workstation for some ephemeral work. But the actual workflow happens in the ERP system. Or the CRM. Or the PIM system. Or in Tableau. Or Databricks. And my beef is with people who think their personal flavour of alternate software should bypass that, even when they have been explicitly told not to. When someone needs to stream the truth (data-wise), that comes out of those systems, not some kludgy sheet on someone's network share. Those are the rules that we set up. I don't understand why this is so difficult for everyone to understand (on HN of all places). These are general staff functions we practically have entire schools for, to make people work this way.
- mopsi 2y ago
  I love that you mentioned PIM systems. I've worked with product information systems from small 3-man companies all the way to Fortune 500 companies, and without exception, their PIM systems have been total dogshit: slow, extremely unintuitive, limited in functionality and borderline unusable. When I need a list of product names, barcodes, weight and dimensions, nothing beats a simple Excel table that can be quickly transformed into whatever format I need at the moment. With the intensity of a thousand suns, I hate the "workflows" of having to create an account, sign in, browse products, put them into a cart, submit an order, and then wait for an email with a download link to some non-standard XML dump or broken CSV that their multi-million dollar PIM system produces. These systems have wasted entire lifetimes worth of their users' time. When it comes to sharing product information, nothing beats the ease of use and flexibility of a plain Excel table.
  - oneplane 2y ago
    Our live PIM database is over 2TB, we're not going to copy that to excel. On top of that, we're also not going to have everyone do a little bit of PIM here and there, we stream 80 to 90 PIM mutations per second across various systems. You get a PIM frontend with appropriate access and that's it. Technically, the only real PIM work the teams do is corrections, there is practically no manual entry. Luckily for us, we put request-response time in the requirements documents, so our PIM users get sub-50ms responses for everything. As for sharing data, our manufacturers and subcontractors use APIs (with the exception of some wanting JSON uploads via SFTP), most of them stream directly into their PIM or ERP (yes, some don't have dedicated PIM systems and just use their ERP for that). Even if we could have the data flow through individual workstations, we'd still not do that as we don't want to legal and repetitional risk associated with that, especially since it is completely avoidable. As written in a different reply, sometimes people want to do some local fiddling around and they will export some data. But that data is considered expired, and not part of the normal data flow. Which was my point: spreadsheets are never part of the main loop. And anyone who wants to build a system where it is, is not working for us. I do notice a trend here, lots of people having bad systems (slow PIM, outdated ERP, missing CRM), which is probably something that should be fixed, rather than taking the shadow route. Escaping to a spreadsheet is just that: escaping.
    - eviks 2y ago
      > Our live PIM database is over 2TB, we're not going to copy that to excel. And you wouldn't need to, you would extract a much smaller subset to Excel and enjoy a superior user interface further analysing that
      - oneplane 2y ago
        Our PIM team disagrees with that take. They enjoy the PIM interface and Excel doesn't come close to the data hierarchy and relationships our systems provide. And that includes reporting, vendor exchange and internal integrations. But perhaps you're missing the point here (like plenty of others): it is not about handling a few offline rows, it's about re-inventing established systems that have proven their value and risk mitigations. We don't want someone to setup a collection files to build a homebrew PIM or ERP or CRM because they feel like it, disconnecting themselves from the organisation and teams they work with. In most cases, single player data silos are bad.

oneplane 2y ago

That's great, but has little to do with the 'excel is my hammer, therefore everything is an excel-shaped nail' problem. Sure, like I wrote (twice already), you might need to have some malleable rows in front of you on your local workstation for some ephemeral work. But the actual workflow happens in the ERP system. Or the CRM. Or the PIM system. Or in Tableau. Or Databricks. And my beef is with people who think their personal flavour of alternate software should bypass that, even when they have been explicitly told not to. When someone needs to stream the truth (data-wise), that comes out of those systems, not some kludgy sheet on someone's network share. Those are the rules that we set up. I don't understand why this is so difficult for everyone to understand (on HN of all places). These are general staff functions we practically have entire schools for, to make people work this way.

mopsi 2y ago
I love that you mentioned PIM systems. I've worked with product information systems from small 3-man companies all the way to Fortune 500 companies, and without exception, their PIM systems have been total dogshit: slow, extremely unintuitive, limited in functionality and borderline unusable. When I need a list of product names, barcodes, weight and dimensions, nothing beats a simple Excel table that can be quickly transformed into whatever format I need at the moment. With the intensity of a thousand suns, I hate the "workflows" of having to create an account, sign in, browse products, put them into a cart, submit an order, and then wait for an email with a download link to some non-standard XML dump or broken CSV that their multi-million dollar PIM system produces. These systems have wasted entire lifetimes worth of their users' time. When it comes to sharing product information, nothing beats the ease of use and flexibility of a plain Excel table.
- oneplane 2y ago
  Our live PIM database is over 2TB, we're not going to copy that to excel. On top of that, we're also not going to have everyone do a little bit of PIM here and there, we stream 80 to 90 PIM mutations per second across various systems. You get a PIM frontend with appropriate access and that's it. Technically, the only real PIM work the teams do is corrections, there is practically no manual entry. Luckily for us, we put request-response time in the requirements documents, so our PIM users get sub-50ms responses for everything. As for sharing data, our manufacturers and subcontractors use APIs (with the exception of some wanting JSON uploads via SFTP), most of them stream directly into their PIM or ERP (yes, some don't have dedicated PIM systems and just use their ERP for that). Even if we could have the data flow through individual workstations, we'd still not do that as we don't want to legal and repetitional risk associated with that, especially since it is completely avoidable. As written in a different reply, sometimes people want to do some local fiddling around and they will export some data. But that data is considered expired, and not part of the normal data flow. Which was my point: spreadsheets are never part of the main loop. And anyone who wants to build a system where it is, is not working for us. I do notice a trend here, lots of people having bad systems (slow PIM, outdated ERP, missing CRM), which is probably something that should be fixed, rather than taking the shadow route. Escaping to a spreadsheet is just that: escaping.
  - eviks 2y ago
    > Our live PIM database is over 2TB, we're not going to copy that to excel. And you wouldn't need to, you would extract a much smaller subset to Excel and enjoy a superior user interface further analysing that
    - oneplane 2y ago
      Our PIM team disagrees with that take. They enjoy the PIM interface and Excel doesn't come close to the data hierarchy and relationships our systems provide. And that includes reporting, vendor exchange and internal integrations. But perhaps you're missing the point here (like plenty of others): it is not about handling a few offline rows, it's about re-inventing established systems that have proven their value and risk mitigations. We don't want someone to setup a collection files to build a homebrew PIM or ERP or CRM because they feel like it, disconnecting themselves from the organisation and teams they work with. In most cases, single player data silos are bad.