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Excel is king of cancer that you’ll implore to cut out once you realize it slowly kills your business. A perfect trap for novice entrepreneurs. 30% of my jobs

by wruza 2y ago

Excel is king of cancer that you’ll implore to cut out once you realize it slowly kills your business. A perfect trap for novice entrepreneurs. 30% of my jobs when I was in integration was unfucking folders of folders of irregular xls built by users, and sometimes we just failed due to the sheer amount of crap which was in motion and had to be transitioned atomically. It never worked first and second time, so we had to do waves of complex transitions with parallel accounting (double workload on an already suffocating business), until things failed rarely enough to be scheduled as regular bug fixing tasks.

Affric 2y ago
How did you fix the user habits in the end?
- wruza 2y ago
  I don’t think it’s fixable. Excel enables chaotic “development” and it just happens. In the end we either left them with a system they ordered or bailed out cause it wasn’t worth it. Edit: to clear misunderstandings, I didn’t fix their spreadsheets. I extracted knowledge and processes from there and from users and built a new system after discussing how it all and their ideas check together.
  - listenallyall 2y ago
    And I'd bet that after you left, your system was ignored or fell apart while those "chaotic" employees with their spreadsheets just kept chugging along fine.
    - wruza 2y ago
      Not sure why you’re assuming the worst of me here.
      - listenallyall 2y ago
        a) because you yourself wrote "sometimes we just failed" and "I don't think it's fixable", and b) because in many years of corporate experience, the vast majority of systems built with the intention of replacing Excel processes fail to achieve that goal. It is true that knowledge workers are often disorganized and messy - in large part, because actual business is also messy and changes very quickly. When you start with the attitude of "unfucking" and "sheer amount of crap", it's obvious that you actually aren't respectful and aware of the actual day-to-day demands of business, their bosses, presentation requirements, messy input sources, etc. Pure, testable code may be more elegant but it simply is not as flexible and UI-friendly as Excel, which is a large part of why these types of projects fail at such a high rate.
        wruza 2y ago
        I am not respectful of excel at all, true. I could see your perspective, if it wasn’t a client who comes by itself(!) begging to do something with their spreadsheets cause key roles spend all day maintaining these, blocking further growth or mergers. Maybe I should not have called it crap out if respect to a client, but that’s what it was from the design pov, no reason to spare a word. I didn’t like it cause no one likes to dig in such sort of legacy. You treat the failure rate as an excel good indicator, well that may seem true until you get yet another call for help. It’s a failure rate of excel. I agree that we should have just bailed out by default and left them to sales sharks. At some point that’s what I did basically, said no to yet another “project”, cause these were crappy low hanging fruits that no one else wanted to deal with, not interesting jobs. Idk how it all assembles into “excel good” in some minds. As if companies just called integrators out of boredom because everything they’ve built in excel works.
        listenallyall 2y ago
        You're saying Excel failed, when the work was mostly getting done, if inefficiently. You showed up, unburdened by Excel, and soon quit ("bailed out" -- your words) because the projects were "crappy", "not interesting", "no one wanted to deal with". Yea, boring, crappy projects are a big, but essential part of business! Lets be clear, YOU failed. Processes built upon Excel are often messy and inefficient, that's well-established, but just like in this example, attempting to replicate the processes without using Excel often implodes entirely.

by wruza 2y ago

Affric 2y ago

How did you fix the user habits in the end?

wruza 2y ago
I don’t think it’s fixable. Excel enables chaotic “development” and it just happens. In the end we either left them with a system they ordered or bailed out cause it wasn’t worth it. Edit: to clear misunderstandings, I didn’t fix their spreadsheets. I extracted knowledge and processes from there and from users and built a new system after discussing how it all and their ideas check together.
- listenallyall 2y ago
  And I'd bet that after you left, your system was ignored or fell apart while those "chaotic" employees with their spreadsheets just kept chugging along fine.
  - wruza 2y ago
    Not sure why you’re assuming the worst of me here.
    - listenallyall 2y ago
      a) because you yourself wrote "sometimes we just failed" and "I don't think it's fixable", and b) because in many years of corporate experience, the vast majority of systems built with the intention of replacing Excel processes fail to achieve that goal. It is true that knowledge workers are often disorganized and messy - in large part, because actual business is also messy and changes very quickly. When you start with the attitude of "unfucking" and "sheer amount of crap", it's obvious that you actually aren't respectful and aware of the actual day-to-day demands of business, their bosses, presentation requirements, messy input sources, etc. Pure, testable code may be more elegant but it simply is not as flexible and UI-friendly as Excel, which is a large part of why these types of projects fail at such a high rate.
      - wruza 2y ago
        I am not respectful of excel at all, true. I could see your perspective, if it wasn’t a client who comes by itself(!) begging to do something with their spreadsheets cause key roles spend all day maintaining these, blocking further growth or mergers. Maybe I should not have called it crap out if respect to a client, but that’s what it was from the design pov, no reason to spare a word. I didn’t like it cause no one likes to dig in such sort of legacy. You treat the failure rate as an excel good indicator, well that may seem true until you get yet another call for help. It’s a failure rate of excel. I agree that we should have just bailed out by default and left them to sales sharks. At some point that’s what I did basically, said no to yet another “project”, cause these were crappy low hanging fruits that no one else wanted to deal with, not interesting jobs. Idk how it all assembles into “excel good” in some minds. As if companies just called integrators out of boredom because everything they’ve built in excel works.
        listenallyall 2y ago
        You're saying Excel failed, when the work was mostly getting done, if inefficiently. You showed up, unburdened by Excel, and soon quit ("bailed out" -- your words) because the projects were "crappy", "not interesting", "no one wanted to deal with". Yea, boring, crappy projects are a big, but essential part of business! Lets be clear, YOU failed. Processes built upon Excel are often messy and inefficient, that's well-established, but just like in this example, attempting to replicate the processes without using Excel often implodes entirely.