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Hmmm the Brendas I know look a little different. “There are two Brendas - their job is to make spreadsheets in the Finance department. Well, not quite - they a

Hmmm the Brendas I know look a little different. “There are two Brendas - their job is to make spreadsheets in the Finance department. Well, not quite - they add the months and categories to empty spreadsheets, then they ask the other departments to fill in their sales numbers every month so it can be presented to management. “The two Brendas don’t seem to talk, otherwise they would realize that they’re both asking everyone for the same information, twice. And they’re so focused on their little spreadsheet worlds that neither sees enough of the bigger picture to say, ‘Wait… couldn’t we just automate this so we don’t need to do this song and dance every month? Then we wouldn’t need two people in different parts of the company compiling the same data manually.’ “But that’s not what Brenda was hired for. She’s a spreadsheet person, not a process fixer. She just makes the spreadsheets.” We need fewer Brendas, and more people who can automate away the need for them.

SirFatty 1y ago
"We need fewer Brendas, and more people who can automate away the need for them." True... I have an on-staff data engineer for the purpose. But not all companies (especially in the SMB space) have that luxury.
7thaccount 1y ago
That's a pretty specific example when there are a lot of good "spreadsheet people" out there who do a lot more than spreadsheets (maybe they had to write SQL queries or scripts to get those numbers), but commonly need to simplify things down to a spreadsheet or power point for upper management. I'm not saying you should have multiple people doing redundant work, but this style isn't entirely dumb. What would this be replaced by? Some kind of large SAP like system that costs millions of dollars and requires a dozen IT staff to maintain?
- Esophagus4 1y ago
  Fair - I was creating a straw man mostly to make a point. The people I’m thinking aren’t running SQL queries or scripts, they’re merely collection points for data. So one good BI developer who knows Tableau and Salesforce and Excel and SQL can replace those pure collection points with a better process, but they can also generate insight into the data because they have some business understanding from being close to the teams, which is what my hypothetical Brenda can’t do. In my example, Brenda would be asking sales leaders to enter in their data instead of going into Salesforce herself because she doesn’t know that tool / side of the company well enough. I was making the point that, contrary to the article, the Brendas I know aren’t touched by the Excel angels, they’re just maintaining spreadsheets that we probably shouldn’t have anyway.
  - 7thaccount 1y ago
    I think that is a fair point too. The person that builds the Tableau dashboard could just send Brenda a screenshot once a month and that saves everyone time.
    - simonw 1y ago
      A screenshot of a Tableau dashboard is possibly the most dangerous form of internal data communication there is, because it entirely removes any chance of digging into that dashboard and figuring out what queries created it and spotting the incorrect assumptions they made along the way. A hill I will die on is that business analytics need "view source" or they aren't worth the pixels they are rendered with.
      - 7thaccount 1y ago
        I respectfully disagree. The amount of folks in upper management that can actually use something like Tableau is very small. However it doesn't matter as none of those people have the time outside of very small businesses which probably don't need it anyway. The business intelligence person is supposed to deliver succinct insights to upper management to act on, not say "here's a cool system I built you... figure it out yourself". Executives aren't getting paid $$$$$$$$ to do data analysis. Hopefully I'm not misrepresenting your point.
        simonw 1y ago
        The view source link isn't there so upper management who don't know SQL can look at it. It's there so other people in the organization who do know SQL have the opportunity to check the work. At my last large employer I genuinely lost count of the number of times I saw a BI report which pulled numbers from our data warehouse... and then found out it had misinterpreted a key detail because the engineering team had changed some table design six months ago and the data analysis team hadn't been told about the change.
        1y ago
oytis 1y ago
And then you end up with a team of five people each tree times as expensive as Brenda, and what used to be an email now takes a sprint and has to go through ticket system.
- Esophagus4 1y ago
  That’s not what I had in mind. Then you end up with a report that goes out automatically every month to leadership pulled directly from the Salesforce data, along with a real time dashboard anyone in the org can look at, broken down by team, vertical, and sales volume. Why are people so attached to manual process?
  - 131012 1y ago
    Because when one exec ask: "Why is that?" the room goes silent.
  - daveguy 1y ago
    It's not what you had in mind, but that's what you get. Because automation, integration, and AI are currently garbage -- Salesforce, Netsuite, doesn't matter. They don't do the magic that they promise. Because process is still very much a human problem, not a computational one.
RegW 1y ago
> But that’s not what Brenda was hired for. Are you suggesting that Brenda should stay in her box?
- Esophagus4 1y ago
  No, I’m suggesting that she is ineffective exactly because she stays in her box. She should replaced with someone who says, “this box doesn’t need to be here… there is a better way of doing things.” NOT to be confused with the junior engineer who comes into a project and says it’s garbage and suggests we rewrite it from scratch in ${hotLanguage} because they saw it on a blog somewhere.
  - daveguy 1y ago
    It may not be what you meant to say, but it's exactly what you are saying where ${hotLanguage} is the latest automation platform or AI gimmick.
    - Esophagus4 1y ago
      I’m not sure why you’re going down to the mat for hanging onto redundant people putting numbers in spreadsheets. At large companies in particular, there are far too many people who simply turn their widgets - this was the entire point of the tech revolution. Think about how many bookkeepers were needed before Excel. Someone could have made your exact same argument (but it’s just the latest gimmick!) about Excel 30 years ago. And yet, technology will make businesses more efficient whether people stand in its way or not. Even at a small company of one or two, QuickBooks will reduce the amount of bookkeepers and accountants needed. TurboTax will further reduce that. We will need fewer people in the future maintaining their Excel spreadsheets, and more people building the automation for those processes. The change averse will always find reasons not to adapt - they will create their own obsolescence. (inb4 but it’s way more expensive to pay developers to automate!)
      - daveguy 1y ago
        I'm not going to the mat for anyone. I'm just saying AI use in spreadsheets is a terrible idea because AI just isn't that good. Currently I'd put it worse than tearing things up for ${hotLanguage} because at least ${hotLanguage} is deterministic and debuggable. Honestly, I'm not sure why you're going to the mat for AI in spreadsheets, or why you think it's a good use case, or why you seem to think "automation" doesn't come with overhead of its own. Current iterations of AI are recommendation engines. Even then you better have version control.
jimnotgym 1y ago
With respect, you probably only see that bit of Finance, but doesn't mean that is all Brenda does. At least half of the work in my senior Finance team involves meeting people in operations to find out what they are planning to do and to analyse the effects, and present them to decision makers to help them understand the consequences of decisions. For an AI to help, someone would have to trigger those conversations in the first place and ask the right questions. The rest of the work involves tidying up all the exceptions that the automation failed on. Meanwhile copilot in Excel can't even edit the sheet you are working on. If you say to it, 'give me a template for an expense claim' it will give you a sheet to download... probably with #REF written in where the answers should be.
nashashmi 1y ago
> We need fewer Brendas... We need more Brendas (those who excel goddesses come and kiss on the forehead) and need less people who are disrespectful of Brendas. The example in this post is someone giving more respect to AI than Brenda.
martin-t 1y ago
Y'know why people don't automate their jobs? It's not a skill issue it's an incentives issue. If you do your job, you get paid periodically. If you automate your job, you get paid once for automating it and then nothing, despite your automation constantly producing value for the company. To fix this, we need to pay people continually for their past work as long as it keeps producing value.
- Esophagus4 1y ago
  Not always: If you don’t automate it: 1a) your company keeps you hanging on forever maintaining the same widget until the end of time OR 1b) more likely, someone realizes your job should be automated and lays you off at some point down the road If you do automate it 2a) your company thanks you then fires you OR 2b) you are now assigned to automate more stuff as you’ve proven that you are more valuable to the company than just maintaining your widget ———— 2b is really the safest long term position for any employee, I think. It’s not always foolproof, as 2a can happen. But I’d rather be in box 2 than box 1 any day of the week if we’re talking long term employment potential.
  - martin-t 1y ago
    Yes, but notice what you are describing are all negative incentives. When automation produces value for the company, the people automating it should capture a chunk of that value _as a matter of course_. Even if you argue that you can then negotiate better compensation: 1) That is uncertain and delayed reward - and only if other people feel like it, it's not automatic. 2) The reward stops if you get fired or leave, despite the automation still producing value - you are also basically incentivized to build stuff that requires constant maintenance. Imagine you spend a man-month building the automation and then leave, it then requires a man-month of maintenance over the next 5 years. At the end of the 5 years, you should still be getting 50% of the reward.
    - Esophagus4 1y ago
      My knee jerk reaction is to disagree, but on second thought, I’m open to hearing the argument. What would that look like in practice?
conductr 1y ago
I work in corporate finance and these issues are certainly present. However, they are almost always known and determined low priority to have a better process built. Finance processes are nearly always a non priority as a pure cost center/overhead there’s not many companies that want to invest in improving the situation, they’ll limp along with minimal investment even once big and profitable. That said, every finance function is different and it may be unknown to them that you’re being asked for some data multiple times. If you’re enduring this process, I’m of the opinion you’re equally at fault. Suggest a solution that will be easier on you. As it’s possible they don’t even know it’s happening. In the case provided, email to all relevant finance people “Here’s a link to a shared workbook. I’ll drop the numbers here monthly, please save the link and get the data directly from that file. Thanks!” Problem solved. Until you don’t follow through which is what causes most finance people to be constantly asking for data/things. So be kind and also set yourself a monthly recurring reminder on your calendar and actually follow through.
- Esophagus4 1y ago
  I’ve just set the finance people up with read only access to our data source, and they now can poke through it themselves.
  - conductr 1y ago
    Also an acceptable solution. This is usually where the next step is have a BI type person just create a report for finance. Many reasons but what will end up is different people are filtering/retrieving the data differently causing inconsistencies. But Usually finance is always preferring on demand access so the communication feedback loop of asking for stuff is not well liked so I’m sure they appreciate this middle step too. There are many cases where there’s no easy way to give access to the data and a human in the loop is required. In that case, do the shared workbook thing I mentioned as a starting point at least. It may evolve from there.
- xnorswap 1y ago
  And they've all been burned by enterprise finance products which were sold to solve exactly that problem. Only different companies were all sold different enterprise finance products, but they need to communicate with each other (or themselves after mergers), so it all gets manually copied into Excel and emailed around each month.
codeulike 1y ago
But then you need someone to maintain/look after that automation, and they'll be more expensive than two Brendas And now if one of the Brendas wants to change their process slightly, add some more info, they can't just do it anymore. They have to have a three way discussion with the other Brenda, the automation guy and maybe a few managers. It will take months. So then its likely better for Brenda to just go back to using her spreadsheet again, and then you've got an automated process that no longer meets peoples needs and will be a faff to update.
- codeulike 1y ago
  For the record, I wouldn't usually use Brendas as a collective noun like this, it feels a bit wrong, but my aim was to make sense in context of the above comment.
onionisafruit 1y ago
People’s reaction to this varies based on the Brendas they’ve worked with. Some are given a specific task to do with their spreadsheets every week and have to just do as they are told even if they can see it’s not a good process. Others are secretly the brains of the company – the only one who really sees the whole picture. And a good number of Brendas are the company owner doing her best with the only tool she’s had the time to learn.
buellerbueller 1y ago
Not every topic on HN needs a contrarian's hot take.
- Esophagus4 1y ago
  Well that wasn’t very nice. Do you have anything to say other than, “I don’t need to hear what you have to say”?
  - buellerbueller 1y ago
    I think this repartee encapsulates a huge frustration with the tech sector: > op (as legacy business): BAU > you (as tech): disrupt! disrupt! disrupt! > me: no thank you; that's not necessary > you (as tech): stop being mean! Not wanting your "disruption" is not being un-nice. Your disruption was not asked for in the first place. Forcing it (Uber, Doge, et. al.) on marketplaces, often illegally, and vacuuming it up the income ladder to the already-wealthy IS the "not nice" thing.
    - Esophagus4 1y ago
      Ah, I think I understand - this isn't about me... this is about a whole lot more than me. You just see me as a target to displace that onto. I'm the representative for what you believe is wrong with tech.
      - buellerbueller 1y ago
        >You just see me as a target to displace that onto. I see your hot take as emblematic of those issues. Why would you think any internet comment is about you?
dogleash 1y ago
You've lost the plot and are just trauma dumping.

SirFatty 1y ago

"We need fewer Brendas, and more people who can automate away the need for them." True... I have an on-staff data engineer for the purpose. But not all companies (especially in the SMB space) have that luxury.

7thaccount 1y ago

That's a pretty specific example when there are a lot of good "spreadsheet people" out there who do a lot more than spreadsheets (maybe they had to write SQL queries or scripts to get those numbers), but commonly need to simplify things down to a spreadsheet or power point for upper management. I'm not saying you should have multiple people doing redundant work, but this style isn't entirely dumb. What would this be replaced by? Some kind of large SAP like system that costs millions of dollars and requires a dozen IT staff to maintain?

Esophagus4 1y ago
Fair - I was creating a straw man mostly to make a point. The people I’m thinking aren’t running SQL queries or scripts, they’re merely collection points for data. So one good BI developer who knows Tableau and Salesforce and Excel and SQL can replace those pure collection points with a better process, but they can also generate insight into the data because they have some business understanding from being close to the teams, which is what my hypothetical Brenda can’t do. In my example, Brenda would be asking sales leaders to enter in their data instead of going into Salesforce herself because she doesn’t know that tool / side of the company well enough. I was making the point that, contrary to the article, the Brendas I know aren’t touched by the Excel angels, they’re just maintaining spreadsheets that we probably shouldn’t have anyway.
- 7thaccount 1y ago
  I think that is a fair point too. The person that builds the Tableau dashboard could just send Brenda a screenshot once a month and that saves everyone time.
  - simonw 1y ago
    A screenshot of a Tableau dashboard is possibly the most dangerous form of internal data communication there is, because it entirely removes any chance of digging into that dashboard and figuring out what queries created it and spotting the incorrect assumptions they made along the way. A hill I will die on is that business analytics need "view source" or they aren't worth the pixels they are rendered with.
    - 7thaccount 1y ago
      I respectfully disagree. The amount of folks in upper management that can actually use something like Tableau is very small. However it doesn't matter as none of those people have the time outside of very small businesses which probably don't need it anyway. The business intelligence person is supposed to deliver succinct insights to upper management to act on, not say "here's a cool system I built you... figure it out yourself". Executives aren't getting paid $$$$$$$$ to do data analysis. Hopefully I'm not misrepresenting your point.
      - simonw 1y ago
        The view source link isn't there so upper management who don't know SQL can look at it. It's there so other people in the organization who do know SQL have the opportunity to check the work. At my last large employer I genuinely lost count of the number of times I saw a BI report which pulled numbers from our data warehouse... and then found out it had misinterpreted a key detail because the engineering team had changed some table design six months ago and the data analysis team hadn't been told about the change.
        1y ago

oytis 1y ago

And then you end up with a team of five people each tree times as expensive as Brenda, and what used to be an email now takes a sprint and has to go through ticket system.

Esophagus4 1y ago
That’s not what I had in mind. Then you end up with a report that goes out automatically every month to leadership pulled directly from the Salesforce data, along with a real time dashboard anyone in the org can look at, broken down by team, vertical, and sales volume. Why are people so attached to manual process?
- 131012 1y ago
  Because when one exec ask: "Why is that?" the room goes silent.
- daveguy 1y ago
  It's not what you had in mind, but that's what you get. Because automation, integration, and AI are currently garbage -- Salesforce, Netsuite, doesn't matter. They don't do the magic that they promise. Because process is still very much a human problem, not a computational one.

RegW 1y ago

> But that’s not what Brenda was hired for. Are you suggesting that Brenda should stay in her box?

Esophagus4 1y ago
No, I’m suggesting that she is ineffective exactly because she stays in her box. She should replaced with someone who says, “this box doesn’t need to be here… there is a better way of doing things.” NOT to be confused with the junior engineer who comes into a project and says it’s garbage and suggests we rewrite it from scratch in ${hotLanguage} because they saw it on a blog somewhere.
- daveguy 1y ago
  It may not be what you meant to say, but it's exactly what you are saying where ${hotLanguage} is the latest automation platform or AI gimmick.
  - Esophagus4 1y ago
    I’m not sure why you’re going down to the mat for hanging onto redundant people putting numbers in spreadsheets. At large companies in particular, there are far too many people who simply turn their widgets - this was the entire point of the tech revolution. Think about how many bookkeepers were needed before Excel. Someone could have made your exact same argument (but it’s just the latest gimmick!) about Excel 30 years ago. And yet, technology will make businesses more efficient whether people stand in its way or not. Even at a small company of one or two, QuickBooks will reduce the amount of bookkeepers and accountants needed. TurboTax will further reduce that. We will need fewer people in the future maintaining their Excel spreadsheets, and more people building the automation for those processes. The change averse will always find reasons not to adapt - they will create their own obsolescence. (inb4 but it’s way more expensive to pay developers to automate!)
    - daveguy 1y ago
      I'm not going to the mat for anyone. I'm just saying AI use in spreadsheets is a terrible idea because AI just isn't that good. Currently I'd put it worse than tearing things up for ${hotLanguage} because at least ${hotLanguage} is deterministic and debuggable. Honestly, I'm not sure why you're going to the mat for AI in spreadsheets, or why you think it's a good use case, or why you seem to think "automation" doesn't come with overhead of its own. Current iterations of AI are recommendation engines. Even then you better have version control.

jimnotgym 1y ago

With respect, you probably only see that bit of Finance, but doesn't mean that is all Brenda does. At least half of the work in my senior Finance team involves meeting people in operations to find out what they are planning to do and to analyse the effects, and present them to decision makers to help them understand the consequences of decisions. For an AI to help, someone would have to trigger those conversations in the first place and ask the right questions. The rest of the work involves tidying up all the exceptions that the automation failed on. Meanwhile copilot in Excel can't even edit the sheet you are working on. If you say to it, 'give me a template for an expense claim' it will give you a sheet to download... probably with #REF written in where the answers should be.

nashashmi 1y ago

> We need fewer Brendas... We need more Brendas (those who excel goddesses come and kiss on the forehead) and need less people who are disrespectful of Brendas. The example in this post is someone giving more respect to AI than Brenda.

martin-t 1y ago

Y'know why people don't automate their jobs? It's not a skill issue it's an incentives issue. If you do your job, you get paid periodically. If you automate your job, you get paid once for automating it and then nothing, despite your automation constantly producing value for the company. To fix this, we need to pay people continually for their past work as long as it keeps producing value.

Esophagus4 1y ago
Not always: If you don’t automate it: 1a) your company keeps you hanging on forever maintaining the same widget until the end of time OR 1b) more likely, someone realizes your job should be automated and lays you off at some point down the road If you do automate it 2a) your company thanks you then fires you OR 2b) you are now assigned to automate more stuff as you’ve proven that you are more valuable to the company than just maintaining your widget ———— 2b is really the safest long term position for any employee, I think. It’s not always foolproof, as 2a can happen. But I’d rather be in box 2 than box 1 any day of the week if we’re talking long term employment potential.
- martin-t 1y ago
  Yes, but notice what you are describing are all negative incentives. When automation produces value for the company, the people automating it should capture a chunk of that value _as a matter of course_. Even if you argue that you can then negotiate better compensation: 1) That is uncertain and delayed reward - and only if other people feel like it, it's not automatic. 2) The reward stops if you get fired or leave, despite the automation still producing value - you are also basically incentivized to build stuff that requires constant maintenance. Imagine you spend a man-month building the automation and then leave, it then requires a man-month of maintenance over the next 5 years. At the end of the 5 years, you should still be getting 50% of the reward.
  - Esophagus4 1y ago
    My knee jerk reaction is to disagree, but on second thought, I’m open to hearing the argument. What would that look like in practice?

conductr 1y ago

I work in corporate finance and these issues are certainly present. However, they are almost always known and determined low priority to have a better process built. Finance processes are nearly always a non priority as a pure cost center/overhead there’s not many companies that want to invest in improving the situation, they’ll limp along with minimal investment even once big and profitable. That said, every finance function is different and it may be unknown to them that you’re being asked for some data multiple times. If you’re enduring this process, I’m of the opinion you’re equally at fault. Suggest a solution that will be easier on you. As it’s possible they don’t even know it’s happening. In the case provided, email to all relevant finance people “Here’s a link to a shared workbook. I’ll drop the numbers here monthly, please save the link and get the data directly from that file. Thanks!” Problem solved. Until you don’t follow through which is what causes most finance people to be constantly asking for data/things. So be kind and also set yourself a monthly recurring reminder on your calendar and actually follow through.

Esophagus4 1y ago
I’ve just set the finance people up with read only access to our data source, and they now can poke through it themselves.
- conductr 1y ago
  Also an acceptable solution. This is usually where the next step is have a BI type person just create a report for finance. Many reasons but what will end up is different people are filtering/retrieving the data differently causing inconsistencies. But Usually finance is always preferring on demand access so the communication feedback loop of asking for stuff is not well liked so I’m sure they appreciate this middle step too. There are many cases where there’s no easy way to give access to the data and a human in the loop is required. In that case, do the shared workbook thing I mentioned as a starting point at least. It may evolve from there.
xnorswap 1y ago
And they've all been burned by enterprise finance products which were sold to solve exactly that problem. Only different companies were all sold different enterprise finance products, but they need to communicate with each other (or themselves after mergers), so it all gets manually copied into Excel and emailed around each month.

codeulike 1y ago

But then you need someone to maintain/look after that automation, and they'll be more expensive than two Brendas And now if one of the Brendas wants to change their process slightly, add some more info, they can't just do it anymore. They have to have a three way discussion with the other Brenda, the automation guy and maybe a few managers. It will take months. So then its likely better for Brenda to just go back to using her spreadsheet again, and then you've got an automated process that no longer meets peoples needs and will be a faff to update.

codeulike 1y ago
For the record, I wouldn't usually use Brendas as a collective noun like this, it feels a bit wrong, but my aim was to make sense in context of the above comment.

onionisafruit 1y ago

People’s reaction to this varies based on the Brendas they’ve worked with. Some are given a specific task to do with their spreadsheets every week and have to just do as they are told even if they can see it’s not a good process. Others are secretly the brains of the company – the only one who really sees the whole picture. And a good number of Brendas are the company owner doing her best with the only tool she’s had the time to learn.

buellerbueller 1y ago

Not every topic on HN needs a contrarian's hot take.

Esophagus4 1y ago
Well that wasn’t very nice. Do you have anything to say other than, “I don’t need to hear what you have to say”?
- buellerbueller 1y ago
  I think this repartee encapsulates a huge frustration with the tech sector: > op (as legacy business): BAU > you (as tech): disrupt! disrupt! disrupt! > me: no thank you; that's not necessary > you (as tech): stop being mean! Not wanting your "disruption" is not being un-nice. Your disruption was not asked for in the first place. Forcing it (Uber, Doge, et. al.) on marketplaces, often illegally, and vacuuming it up the income ladder to the already-wealthy IS the "not nice" thing.
  - Esophagus4 1y ago
    Ah, I think I understand - this isn't about me... this is about a whole lot more than me. You just see me as a target to displace that onto. I'm the representative for what you believe is wrong with tech.
    - buellerbueller 1y ago
      >You just see me as a target to displace that onto. I see your hot take as emblematic of those issues. Why would you think any internet comment is about you?

dogleash 1y ago

You've lost the plot and are just trauma dumping.