Hacker News Reader

Comment by OzCrimson | Hacker News Reader

See. You've got answers to something that you haven't asked a single question about. But in your judgement the company should have had the right developer on staff.

That's what's frustrating about these anti-Excel discussions.

Ok. What happens when I say that the company bought another company and it had a product line that the new company wanted to pay sales people commissions on? And the compensation plan around it was complex.

For whatever reasons, that's not a report the DBA was up for developing from scratch (or, someone decided his time wasn't to be used that way). That's just the reality.

We can talk about what should have been or what ought to have been, but that doesn't change the reality.

The reality is that I ended up doing most of it ACCURATELY in Excel.

View on HN

> But in your judgement the company should have had the right developer on staff.

Yes, like a janitor for example.

> The reality is that I ended up doing most of it ACCURATELY in Excel.

Yes it's the hammer for all your nails. You could also use Python+Jupyter. There are selfhosted and managed versions.

Because of guys like you, municipial installations run their sewage system with an excel sheet because some guy implemented a vba macro to talk to the sewage api endpoint.

let it go.

I think the company would quickly realize that they need a different solution if they have no Excel wizard on staff, and the team spends weeks just calculating sales commissions.

Or maybe not, and they’d just hire more people solely to calculate commission :/

I would say that you probably do not know what you did wrong having done it in Excel. Stuff gets complicated really fast in Excel thus it’s much easier to do something that you can’t possibly debug and thus live in blissful ignorance.

It's just unbelievable ... how people KNOW about situations that they weren't in and don't ask any questions. But since you brought it up I can tell you about my accuracy in Excel:

- The process involved 2 people checking my work before it was sent to payroll. And we did catch and correct mistakes. We were able to trace back where and how the mistakes were make, and build in ways to prevent or flag future mistakes.

- The job was necessary because of all the garbage in the database. Excel's data-checking and data-cleansing and flexibility was superior to the database.

- After 1 year all of my work was audited. For several dozen sales people, there was ONE person I wasn't 100% accurate with. And that one was off by 0.5%. SUCCESS!

- If we'd gone with the report coming out of the database, things would have been such a confused mess.

It has nothing to do with your particular situation. This is a reasonable assumption to make if somebody comes and wants a solution in Excel.

But ok. So what you are saying your Excel was reviewed by somebody else. How is this any different from reviewing somebody else’s code?

I work in a company where even the least technical analysts are capable of using numpy. We have libraries to use Google Sheets as input-output data. So you get the best of the two worlds.

What does Excel resolve here?

Also I don’t believe that you could not use Excel to cleanse the data and then put it back in the database.

And I also do not believe that a python script would not do the same cleansing of the data in a much more maintainable way.

You've got all the answers about a company in Chicago in 2005-2008 and how it should have been run.

Why didn't you jump in and help us?

I am not giving you advice on how to run a company, I am saying that your anecdotal opinion will not affect my decision-making process. And I am clearly stating that it should not affect the decision-making of other people here either.

Also I am going to underline that what you did was relevant 16 years ago; which you did not state in your initial message about the usefullness of Excel.

Which is kinda funny, if I didn’t ask you would have otherwise omitted a lot of otherwise relevant information which makes your opinion even less important.

It only makes me question why do you take this whole thread so personally? Probably because by now your skills are way less relevant than back in 2005.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com