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Comment by otoburb | Hacker News Reader

Once corporate business analysts, business intelligence or banking teams realize that the definition of "simple, grunt-like programming task" could probably include Excel munging (e.g. VBA macros), I'm sure request volume will hockey-stick.

Might need another example on their website, since the current ones are very developer-centric, which may not reflect their true positioning intent for the service.

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I'm friends with a business analyst at a bank. They use their Bangalore office to do data or excel munging tasks all the time. But it's an offshore office staffed by company employees. There's no way he'd be able to send his data tasks to an outside party. And even if he could, he wouldn't be able to get the bank to pay for it.

    > And even if he could, he wouldn't be able to get the
    > bank to pay for it.

You're thinking about this wrong. Bangalore office is busy today with "strategic projects". No-one bats an eyelid when you expense $150 of programming help on your corporate card. Big companies have people use unofficial resource channels to get stuff done all the time.

> Bangalore office is busy today with "strategic projects".

Interesting. I would really like to know more about those 'strategic projects'.

They're any projects scheduled by someone more senior than you.

Good one :)

That still leaves the problem of sending internal data to outside parties. The accountants may be fine with the programming help, IT certainly shouldn't be.

"Corporate business analysts, business intelligence or banking teams" will quickly lose their jobs if they start handing out their precious in-house data to some random people on the Internets.

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