Re:Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
by anigbrowl on Wednesday November 22, 2017 @04:03PM
(#15760608)
That's great (though I'd quibble about a few of them, eg I was doing input validation in Excel 25 years ago, and boy do I feel old now), but while you're learning to do all that great stuff you're not learning anything about the domain you want to work in.
OK, I don't know who wants to work in health insurance but the basic point is Excel is a good tool for people who have specialist knowledge in a particular domain and want to automate their work. Programmers know the best way of programming but frequently overestimate their understanding of other people's problems.
Re:Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
by watwut on Wednesday November 22, 2017 @04:56PM
(#15761056)
You underestimate how difficult it is to work with at least some software companies, how expensive it is, how difficult negotiation it takes to convince quite a few nerds that user actually has business case for that requirement. And many software companies produce poor quality and are very slower then necessary despite using all buzzwords and all nighters. Managing even outsourced projects takes learning and expensive failures are nor an exception. All in all, the software we all collectively produce is still very expensive and unreliable.
Even absent that, it is difficult to explain what users need to coders who have zero idea about the domain. Unless it turns out they are the kind that just know user is idiot the moment she has different opinion on her own job, in which case expect needed time to tripple.
The homegrown excel is awesome analysis once the company decides to move on. It is concrete, you can generate test cases from it, it has features.
What a professional software developer's workflow has and Excel lacks:
* principled way of sharing code across a team with distributed source control (or similarly powerful tool),
* automated regression tests,
* input validation,
* continuous deployment tools to automatically deploy working code (default mode for Excel I guess), and a mechanism to roll back to a previous version (not so much),
* build and dependency management tools for bringing in libraries from a vast open source ecosystem,
* systems for reporting bugs and feature requests and tracking their progress,
* networked database that is the shared "source of truth" for all users,
* security and auditing,
* hardware capacity planning (run locally or in AWS? what are the cost trade offs?)
So sure, get the health insurance people doing all of those things, and have Microsoft figure out how to do all of them well in Excel, and congratulations, they are now software developers. None of these require using a "real programming language", at least not directly.