Comment by thedudeabides5 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thedudeabides5 | Hacker News Reader

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Well, not exactly like non-Excel systems are bulletproof either.

Entire Japanese stock market went down last week, and it's not like there was a flood of people on HN bemoaning that. At least with Reinhart and Rogoff et al you have a responsible party.

As opposed to 'nameless machine failed, and nameless backup machine also failed, and now it's in JIRA so don't worry about it'.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/business/tokyo-stock-mark...

The glitch stemmed from a problem in the hardware that powers the exchange, said the Japan Exchange Group, the exchange’s operator, during a news conference. The system failed to switch to a backup in response to the problem, a representative said.

I think similar to “code smells” in software engineering, using excel for critical data pipeline work can be considered a “data smell”. It’s not bad in and of itself, but it’s a signal that something may have gone seriously wrong with the data engineering process.

On the other hand, its more like "nobody ever got fired for using excel"

I think in this case it’s more like “nobody who would know better than to use excel had the authority to make the decision not to use excel”. Given that this was a government project, my guess is that there are very few technical people involved at the decision making level.

I'm willing to make an exception in this case.

Unfortunately excel is the lingua franca of data exchange in SME

I am sure there is a solution to this problem that could make someone a fair bit of money, but i am not quite sure what it is yet.

Reminds me of this - https://www.reddit.com/r/programminghorror/comments/fv7qi7/b...

That example is overblown as the system is supposed to be restarted more frequently than that for maintenance. A better example is cars have been frequently rebooting various internal computers while your driving for decades, that seems bad but it’s similarly irrelevant.

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