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Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

#11

Post by lucraft »

mortehu wrote: post #3
zubairq wrote: post #2

In tech most managers and recruiters think there is a skills shortage. This is untrue. The truth is that companies do not want to pay market rates for people with the right skills

What are those people (with the right skills) currently doing instead of working in tech?

Well, for one, they're contracting. Though that isn't quite the same thing as being unavailable, it contributes to a perceived shortage of permanent developers. In London this is because rates for senior developer contractors are something like 50% higher than salaried, and that's only changing very slowly. (Is the situation similar in the US?)

Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

#12

Post by lukezaparaniuk »

pards wrote: post #6

Spreadsheets are widely used in financial institutions, and not just for little things but also for critical tasks too. I've seen spreadsheets sophisticated enough to make database calls to book-of-record systems. These spreadsheets are often put together by an intern or associate who "knows a little VBA" and automates or tracks a task that the business was doing manually. Nobody on the desk really knows how the spre…

Not just financial institutions either: I've worked for two global manufacturing businesses – in very different industries – where fundamental parts of their day-to-day operations were dependent on Excel spreadsheets and Access databases.

I would absolutely echo all your points, especially the rationale behind "real software": it would have been far more expensive, have taken far longer to be delivered, and that's if it were even signed off in the first place. When management sees "real software" as wholly unnecessary and all you have is Excel, you soon learn to be rather creative.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

#13

Post by SFJulie »

Education is an expensive burden on the society that have not proven to worth its value in terms of Return Over Investment.

Funnily, the only persons asserting the value of diploma ... are PhD in ivy league business schools... selling expensive diplomas...

Education is probably a large scale scam in its actual form: too long, too expensive, counter-productive and overrated.

Cf Henri Mintzberg essay on why MBA for instance are a poor choice for being innovative.

"M.B.A. programs train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences," said Henry Mintzberg, a management professor at McGill University in Montreal. "You can't create a manager in a classroom. If you give people who aren't managers the impression that you turned them into one, you've created hubris."

Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

#14

Post by powmonk »

pards wrote: post #6

Spreadsheets are widely used in financial institutions, and not just for little things but also for critical tasks too. I've seen spreadsheets sophisticated enough to make database calls to book-of-record systems. These spreadsheets are often put together by an intern or associate who "knows a little VBA" and automates or tracks a task that the business was doing manually. Nobody on the desk really knows how the spre…

The insurance industry has a lot of this too. Not as much by the sounds of it but our internal reporting relies on it a great deal.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

#15

Post by alok-g »

EliRivers wrote: post #4

The majority of commercial software writers are banging out poorly designed, fragile, inadequately tested and often borderline-unmaintainable code. I feel that people have a kind of double-think about this; they suspect this is the case, but they still expect software to work properly.

The same applies to hardware design at many companies, including reputed ones. I witnessed a case were they went from an R&D prototype to product with no quality control in the design process. Product failures in the market were followed by blame games.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

#16

Post by contingencies »

1. SWIFT was founded as a 'Belgian Cooperative' in the 1970s by an ex American Express executive and grew at a rate unprecedented for its era, its first 'international center of operations' was located in Virginia, co-opened by the then-governor, and nearly co-located with CIA HQ. EU authorities have confirmed that, despite political backlash and a 'SWIFT 2' nominally designed to resolve the problem, every single SWIFT transaction since at least 2001 (read: forever) has been provided in full to the US.

2. The Israeli business AMDOCS with alleged Mossad links is an outsourced and hosted billing provider for telecommunication carriers, whose client list includes large portions of the developed world.

Just sayin'.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

#17

Post by Lordarminius »

pards wrote: post #6

Spreadsheets are widely used in financial institutions, and not just for little things but also for critical tasks too. I've seen spreadsheets sophisticated enough to make database calls to book-of-record systems. These spreadsheets are often put together by an intern or associate who "knows a little VBA" and automates or tracks a task that the business was doing manually. Nobody on the desk really knows how the spre…

> The business prefers spreadsheets over "real software" because they have complete control of it whereas their internal IT department are slow and expensive, and the resulting custom-coded products are often substandard (see zubairq's comment about paying market rate).

I find this very interesting because my company (which I applied to YC 2017 with) is based on exactly this same premise.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

#18

Post by arethuza »

brongondwana wrote: post #8
pards wrote: post #6

Spreadsheets are widely used in financial institutions, and not just for little things but also for critical tasks too. I've seen spreadsheets sophisticated enough to make database calls to book-of-record systems. These spreadsheets are often put together by an intern or associate who "knows a little VBA" and automates or tracks a task that the business was doing manually. Nobody on the desk really knows how the spre…

A spreadsheet can mostly be maintained by the next person to come along. More complex systems often die when the person who knew them leaves. Plus all that stuff about crappy IT departments who don't act as if they exist to serve the actual purpose of the business.

"A spreadsheet can mostly be maintained by the next person to come along."

I do note that you say "mostly" - but I've seen truly epic spreadsheets (including one that my employer at the time spent almost £1 million on) and I'd rather reverse engineer an application with source code rather than a complex spreadsheet (even though the feature in Excel to show dependencies visually is rather cool).

Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

#19

Post by arethuza »

powmonk wrote: post #14
pards wrote: post #6

Spreadsheets are widely used in financial institutions, and not just for little things but also for critical tasks too. I've seen spreadsheets sophisticated enough to make database calls to book-of-record systems. These spreadsheets are often put together by an intern or associate who "knows a little VBA" and automates or tracks a task that the business was doing manually. Nobody on the desk really knows how the spre…

The insurance industry has a lot of this too. Not as much by the sounds of it but our internal reporting relies on it a great deal.

A lot of reporting depends on it - a lot of high end financial reporting applications have Excel spreadsheets as their main output mechanism (e.g. Oracle Hyperion FM).

Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

#20

Post by Lordarminius »

SFJulie wrote: post #13

Education is an expensive burden on the society that have not proven to worth its value in terms of Return Over Investment. Funnily, the only persons asserting the value of diploma ... are PhD in ivy league business schools... selling expensive diplomas... Education is probably a large scale scam in its actual form: too long, too expensive, counter-productive and overrated. Cf Henri Mintzberg essay on why MBA for ins…

> Education is an expensive burden on the society that have not proven to worth its value in terms of Return Over Investment.

As a person from a region of the world with a high level of illiteracy an having witnessed firsthand the ROI of an uneducated citizenry, I would question this assertion

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