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Right before I left Samsung Austin Semiconductor (Samsung’s fab in the U.S.), in 2019, they were phasing out local share drives in favor of a self-hosted cloud
by sgarland 1y ago
Right before I left Samsung Austin Semiconductor (Samsung’s fab in the U.S.), in 2019, they were phasing out local share drives in favor of a self-hosted cloud that Samsung created. The supposed reason was better security, though it’s unclear to me why they couldn’t globally apply whatever rules they wanted to enforce to all office locations, instead of forcing everyone to use a remote endpoint. The throughput was absolutely terrible, like < 1 MBps. My department had some large files, so that was fun.
One such file was an Excel file that was more script than anything else. We had to have labels in a specific format on every machine we owned in the fab, which was something like 250 of them. The normal stuff like its id number, and also which points of contact for a technician and engineer, as well as their photos and phone numbers. Manually balancing and re-balancing every time a shift gained or lost an employee would’ve been obnoxious, so naturally instead countless hours were spent coercing VBA and ODBC to query a DB containing employee info, extracting and resizing their headshot, applying all of this to a template label, queuing a print job, and repeating. It was pretty fun to watch, honestly. I think I also had created a floor plan map somehow, and it would do its best to group a given technician’s assigned machines such that they minimized distance traveled during inspections. Anyway, the large file size was due to it caching the headshots (might have made a hidden tab for each? I don’t remember) for better performance, as that had proven to be a bottleneck.
- gedy 1y agoNice ha. Your story reminds me of why I flinch whenever I hear "just give them the spreadsheet, engineer, don't argue..."
- hbarka 1y agoAt least they didn’t make you use Sharepoint and OneDrive. How fun using VBA and ODBC in 2019, proving the mighty Excel will go on as the new MS Access.
- ryanjshaw 1y agoThis abuse of Excel might be in the running for a new form of esports.
- boredtofears 1y agohttps://excel-esports.com/ https://excel-esports.com/
- fragmede 1y agohttps://youtu.be/QwNoFOUiSiE https://youtu.be/QwNoFOUiSiE
- bombcar 1y agoRoko's Basilisk or whatever it is should more properly be called Excel's Visual Basicilisk - once Excel becomes self-aware it is going to punish everyone who tortured it for decades.
- ethbr1 1y agoIt's always worth remembering there's exactly one reason Excel is abused -- IT isn't giving "non-developers" access to tools they need to automate their work.
- LarMachinarum 1y agowhile I don't doubt that such situations also exist, that wasn't the reason for any of the many "Excel abusers" I've encountered in different positions. Quite to the contrary, these people all had access to the appropriate tools, but their whole thinking was totally formatted and fixated on Excel as their go-to tool for everything: be it things better done with a database, a word processor, a diagramming program, a label generator, a Form editor, a markup language, a web page, anything: they had all the tools at their disposal but no, no, they felt the odd compulsive need to do it with only Excel instead… …often leading to problems down the line when the limitations of Excel for the use case (for which it wasn't made) would show more and more but they wasted already so much time and (needless) effort doing it in Excel that they would be even more reluctant to the possibility of switching to any more appropriate tool for the task.
- tracker1 1y ago
- jve 1y agoIt is great that particular tools enable employees automate stuff and make their work more effective. From developer point of view I see that the effort would most certainly be diverted in another kind of solution. But yeah, "citizen developer" stuff is a thing that microsoft pushes especially in Power Platform / Canvas Apps - one programs with WYSIWIG and Excel-like formulas (PowerFX) But then again I wonder who are the people that can program in VBA and chooses excel. Is it the constraint around software they can use? An excel being a GUI which you don't have to implement? Anyways, a net positive for business.
- WhyNotHugo 1y ago> it’s unclear to me why they couldn’t globally apply whatever rules they wanted to enforce to all office locations, instead of forcing everyone to use a remote endpoint My guess is that they're worried that you'll download data and then copy it out of the device while the device is offline. An employee could even "lose" the device, giving an attacker unbound time to extract data from it. Another equally likely explanation is that the exec in charge of their cloud services gains more prestige due to his solution being universally adopted internally, or some other crap along this line.
- CGMthrowaway 1y agoA common and innovative solution to this problem now, that I have seen in other fabs (not semis, but other industries), is to put QR codes on each machine. That way the info behind it can be dynamic and maintained
- burnt-resistor 1y agoThis is a pathology of megacorps who don't continually reinvest in process and support infrastructure and instead abuse backoffice desktop software inefficiently. In 20/20 retrospect, it should've been converted from Excel to a proper app as soon as it became a bottleneck.
- hulitu 1y ago> it should've been converted from Excel to a proper app as soon as it became a bottleneck. Converting costs money. Unless there is a good reason, nobody will do it.