Re:Making a virtual machine in Google Sheets
by stephenhuey on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @05:56PM
(#14706427)
Unreal. I was working as a developer in their investment bank at that time and by then a lot of their software suite was pretty mature. In credit risk (my group) they had built a sophisticated set of applications to prevent being burned by another Enron. I'm pretty surprised they couldn't ask someone to take your macro and replicate it into a web app, but of course no one asks for our opinion. :)
Re:Making a virtual machine in Google Sheets
by kilroy123 on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @08:00PM
(#14707184)
This is frightening. Couldn't you have easily made a huge error?
probably, but doing the same thing over and over again manually is even more error prone.
Re:Making a virtual machine in Google Sheets
by annnnd on Thursday July 06, 2017 @06:31AM
(#14709328)
Sure - but I am guessing a few errors here and there would have much less impact than a single programming mistake. Not that I think this is the right way, but I do understand where they come from.
Re:Making a virtual machine in Google Sheets
by conductr on Thursday July 06, 2017 @01:33PM
(#14712172)
Human error was much more common. But they did have another tool for reconciling trades that was better. It was web based and auto reconciled most things that were obvious matches. I don't recall why, but they were not too concerned with mistakes so long as we could fix them by the end of business. I think it was because that's when clients would see something was off on their statement/account. There was never a concern of losing money. I wish I could remember why, but this is my cumulative experience in banking industry and I quickly forgot everything I learned.
Re:Making a virtual machine in Google Sheets
by foobarbazetc on Thursday July 06, 2017 @02:27PM
(#14712654)
If you can automate your job you deserve to keep it and get paid for it, IMHO. :)
Not very sophisticated. Each row in the spreadsheet was a trade. The loop would just send commands to a 1970s-era mainframe terminal application. Everything had to be executed in order, just like a human using the keyboard to enter the trades manually. The trades required several calculations, and you'd have to enter the results in terminal screen to execute the trade. Other analysts had been doing those calculations one by one on a calculator next to their mouse. The efficiency being, they didn't need to switch between apps on their PC.
This macro only existed because I built it. They didn't like it much, they wanted me to do it manually. I said OK and kept using the macro anyway. I quit after ~6 months out of boredom.