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Excel isn't the problem. Mediocrity is. Or, I should say, mediocrity when you need something more (like reliability, because you're making major decisions based
by michaelochurch 14y ago
Excel isn't the problem. Mediocrity is. Or, I should say, mediocrity when you need something more (like reliability, because you're making major decisions based on the data furnished).
Excel is great at providing a mediocre database, presentation template, calculation engine, and model builder, all-in-one. It's even Turing complete (although it makes it hard to write decent code, since that's not the point.) It does a large number of things, and a mediocre job of all. Often, this is enough. It gets the job done for small toy problems, and often that's a start. However, basing billion-dollar decisions based on Excel code? Are you kidding me?
This is exactly why I rail so hard (and without giving, ever) against Corporate injections into software. Corporate America is founded on mediocrity being good enough. Sometimes it is. Sometimes, it's fucking not. When it's not, stop using Excel as a database (it's not one) and fire all your CommodityJavaDevelopers writing SingletonVisitorFactories and start doing things right. Since you don't know how, you have to hire someone like me and give that person lots of autonomy, but it can be done.
- nahname 14y agoEven if you are right, that pill will never be swallowed the way you are delivering it.
- michaelochurch 14y agoI'm considering starting an anti-consulting service focused on corporate culture. It's $40k for one month with a catch: after I do X amount of fieldwork and figure out all the things you're screwing up HR and culture-wise, I'd be contractually precluded from working with you in the next 5 years. Why such a restrictive and seemingly self-destructive structure? That structure means I will do something most people (who are looking to retain a long-term employment relationship) won't, and that's tell the truth. Burned Bridges Consulting, LLC.
- jayzee 14y agoI really like the idea of "Burned Bridges Consulting!" There is something there...
- michaelochurch 14y agoI am considering launching as a freelancer and I'm trying to figure out how to finance it in the context of my bidirectionally extreme (high magnitude; both directions) reputation (which is somewhat an exaggeration of my actual personality; when I write, I'm trying to communicate and sometimes I drive hard.) I'd prefer to spend most of my time on actual work. I'm getting back into Clojure and rediscovering the joy of coding (which disappeared, with fleeting breaks in it, when I went to Google and had to answer to a middle manager, which just sucks all the life out of what we do). That said, if someone is willing to give me $40,000 to tell him what he's doing wrong, I'll do so. (In person, I'm much less abrasive, though. If I actually respect someone, and I respect most people, I'm nice.) Burned Bridges Consulting would work because it's structured to produce the only employment relationship in which telling the truth is possible: one where there is no possibility of continuance.
- RWeaver 14y agoI don't know if you've ever been in management, but if not I think that would be the wall you'd run into. Imagine if a manager had tons of advice for programmers, ie; 'listen to what management says, build what we want not what you think we want, pay attention when we interrupt your coding!' If you've already done the whole management thing also and it worked out well then good luck to you.
- michaelochurch 14y agoI'm actually a believer in removing management, at least of the traditional do-as-I-say variety. The only credibility that has any place in anything is the credibility that comes from making others' lives easier-- solving their problems, teaching them, building things they want.
- reaclmbs 14y ago
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- jodrellblank 14y agohttp://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/07/31 http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/07/31
- throwawaay 14y agoExcuse me, but given your history of writing overly verbose, self-important Grand Proclamations: I imagine the only reason someone would have to hire you is if they wanted tomes written about how they could Do Things Right while probably not getting much actual work product done in return.
- michaelochurch 14y agowhile probably not getting much actual work product done in return. That was fucking low, man. I'm actually extremely productive when things work right, but when people persist in fuck-uppery it's like a low-grade chronic earthquake-- not exactly dangerous, but jarring and impossible to ignore and eventually exhausting. By the way, the danger of startups isn't failure. It's that you end up like me: someone who can't tolerate the mediocrity, idiocy, and resistance to creativity that most people bring to their working lives. In most corporate environments, those are affordable background noise. In startups, they're existential risks. Unfortunately, it's hard to unlearn an allergy to fuck-uppery.
- sliverstorm 14y agoI don't approve of attacking other people, but when you sit such a high horse, don't be surprised when someone tries to pull you down.
- michaelochurch 14y agoI am humble and arrogant at the same time. I am humble in the sense that I have a keen awareness of my limitations. I don't know what happens after death. I don't know if there is a God. I don't know more than 1.5 natural languages. I'm a mediocre athlete. On most topics, I'm less smart than a person with a passing knowledge of the field, and my opinion is consequently less useful. I'm arrogant insofar as I've seen through the corporate nonsense and, after having watched people way inferior to me making huge decisions that affect peoples' lives, I feel an urge to step up. I know for a fact that these intellectual children are not the best people to be making such calls, because I am better. Now, that said, I'm far from the smartest person out there and if someone smarter than me steps up so I don't have to, then that's great! I don't care about being the leader and I'd rather not. I want a competent leader. If that person is someone other than me, then great! But usually the people who are smarter than me shy away from power; they're smart enough to realize that that competition is utterly soul-raping. The world needs people like me with actual competence and the courage to, at least, try to turn it into something.
- orangethirty 14y agoI get your point, and agree that Excel is not the problem. What I reason is the issue is that Excel was marketed as the program to use to do any kind of business data calculations and manipulations. As a result, people think that Excel is a great solution to a myriad of problems. You and me know it is not. But try explaining that to a multi million business that grew to that size whilst using Excel. Sure, they need something better, yet will almost never understand why. People are also afraid of change. They are convinced Excel is the mesiah of business software. How could you convince anyone to give up their mesiah?
- marcosdumay 14y ago> How could you convince anyone to give up their mesiah? Yeah, you don't. But you let them fail, and then convince the next generation that their elder's messiah is a fraud. Mainly by being very vocal, and using the failures to showcase your point. In a while, either everybody realise what they're worshiping is just some normal piece of data, or you started another holly war.
- gruseom 14y agoThat's not why people don't want to give up Excel. It's because in Excel they can do what they want themselves rather than having to rely on programmers. That's a really big deal and it's not something we programmers can easily appreciate.
- auggierose 14y agoMmmh, you write so much that it would be easy to write you off as crazy lunatic (as some here do for sure). But you amassed crazy Karma in just 2 years and I very much agree with your last two blog posts, so I'll give you the benefit of my doubt. Also this comment about Excel is spot-on.
- michaelochurch 14y agoit would be easy to write you off as crazy lunatic (as some here do for sure). Only the 10 or so Google trolls. But you amassed crazy Karma in just 2 years and I very much agree with your last two blog posts, so I'll give you the benefit of my doubt. Also this comment about Excel is spot-on. Thanks. I try.
- bloblaw 14y agoYou should call it as you see it. The comment sure looks, walks, and quacks like a troll.
- gav 14y agoIt's a crazy rant against mediocrity; given the majority of corporations will be average or worse, what's his goal? To tell people to try harder?
- michaelochurch 14y agoMediocrity != average. The average MIT CS grad student isn't mediocre, but even above-average corporate cultures (e.g. Google, which is legitimately top-20%) are mediocre. I feel like mediocrity (as a pejorative) is an artifact of a convex performance function where excellence is 10x as potent as a half-assed performance, as opposed to concave work where it's 1.2x. We don't gripe about cab drivers doing "mediocre" work. We ask them to take us somewhere and if they do it, we're usually happy. [ETA: I realize I didn't answer your question. The reason corporate mediocrity is evil is that it's an artifact of the wrong people making decisions. If you wish to excel, you'll make a real effort to listen to people and get the right ideas into implementation. But a lot of companies tolerate executive bikeshedding because they don't care about excellence.]
- bloblaw 14y agoSo Excel is garbage and the best solution is to hire you? Let me guess...you're a consultant. Watch a skilled engineer or accountant use Excel and you'll see it's good for more than "toy problems".
- michaelochurch 14y agoExcel is not garbage. I'm not a MSFT fan at all but it's a great product. It is not, however, * a database, * a high-performance computation framework, * a good programming model for long-lived "code" or multiple-writer projects.
- gtani 14y agoi found out the other day criticizing anything about excel gets you pushback or backlash or some kind of "back" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5574764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5574764
- LyndsySimon 14y agoIf you want to be semantic, it is in fact a database. It isn't a good RDBMS, but it is a database. It's also not a bad computational framework, within the bounds of its capabilities.
- WalterBright 14y ago> Corporate America is founded on mediocrity being good enough. Corporate America isn't founded on anything in particular. Corporations are founded on what its individual founders think is important. This implies that if you have a better idea on how to run a corporation, start one and prove it's better.
- _delirium 14y agoThere's a rather complex relationship between business success and being "better" in any sense other than the mere tautological fact of business success. It is not a very good way to "prove" anything beyond that, without either additional evidence, or axiomatic assumptions.
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- unholyalliance 14y agoTo use the old saying, when all you have is a hammer, everthing begins to look like a nail. To most office workers, Excel is their hammer. You can stretch it to extreme limits by using things like pivot tables, and complicated lookup functions. It's easier for them this way, that is to say they have fluency in excel, but none in programming, which means they fail to realize that a simple well written script could save them from every having to repeat a task.
- michaelochurch 14y agoThis is a great point. Excel is a great tool, but it's the Blub of non-technical business people.
- LyndsySimon 14y agoExcel is extremely powerful for data analysis, and is getting more powerful still as new versions are released. If a dataset is under 200k or so rows, I'll generally do analysis in Excel. Larger than that, and I'm turning to Python. Even then, the end result has be be passed to someone who isn't an analyst/developer, so where does it go? You guessed it: into an Excel spreadsheet, formatted nice and neat, and sent up the chain.
- redler 14y agoYou can't spell "autonomy" without "money". Well, yes you can. But the point stands -- replace autonomy with money in that sentence. There are organizational pathologies that lead to big companies not hiring the most talented and independent thinkers, but in so many cases the problem is that they don't want to spend sufficient money for a staff with the skills, experience, and creativity to provide solutions better than "works well enough".
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- Too 14y agoThat's how these decision makers earn their money. If everything works they can claim they did in one month what a team of 10 would do in a year. Bang, instant bonus! If things doesn't work, they blame the tools and try again.