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A comment on Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands. Parent comment

Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by curun1r on Thursday November 30, 2017 @07:59PM (#15821126)
Us programmers also think about things like failure scenarios and disaster recovery. It may be trendy to criticize us for overcomplicating designs--and many do--but non-tech people using Excel are often doing more than just getting the job done...they're creating a disaster waiting to happen.
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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by oldandtired on Thursday November 30, 2017 @11:38PM (#15821952)
I have been on both sides of the divide and my view is that the overcomplicated designs are more hazardous. If one understands the end user and their requirements, one is generally able to steer them in the appropriate direction.

However, the general view of IT departments is that they just dictate what they want and not help with what is needed. policy is set and then demanded to be followed with little or no justification to the end user why and how it will benefit the end user.

The number of times that I as IT professional (designer, developer, etc) have had to fight the IT department over some problem to get it solved is far too many. Instead of fixing or changing something that will allow end users to actually get on with their word, IT departments are seen as dictatorial time wasters who don't get back to you to sort out what is needed.

Part of our job is to think of failure scenarios and disaster recovery. This should not get in the road of those using the systems being put in place. The end user has a job to do, we as professionals should be providing good solution to enhance as well as protecting them from any disasters.

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by never_immune on Thursday November 30, 2017 @10:16PM (#15821636)
I wouldn't generalize too much. I once took a job where a $50 million in revenue a year business was running on a single AWS server that included everything (web, database, cache, etc.) with no backup of the data and the server was hand-maintained.

It was truly a disaster waiting to happen.

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