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Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle

theregister.com

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Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle

#21

Post by xboxnolifes »

b112 wrote: post #6
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #3

The previous article that is linked to in the text is worth a read to: https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/12/excel_anesthetist_rec... "ANRO decided to honor the 10 job offers it had made by mistake and used Oriel to tell the candidates. Unfortunately, a system error in Oriel meant it then erroneously sent that communication to an additional 16 candidates. ANRO decided to honor these 16 additional offers too, and fin…

But that's insane! These candidates hold people's lives in their hands, and they just hured unqualified candidates!

When 500 people apply for a job with 1 open position, does that immediately make 499 of them unqualified?

Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle

#23

Post by cool_dude85 »

roenxi wrote: post #2

> Proposing the motion at this week's meeting, Dr Marks said: "I'm no expert on HR software, but I do know that manually copying and pasting from seven different Excel sheets, all laid out in different ways, is bound to go wrong one day. So who set up the system? Who set up the QA processes and the staff training?" This sounds pretty standard to me. Spreadsheet stacks are actually effective - and often robust if the…

>Spreadsheet stacks are actually effective - and often robust if the Copy Paste technician has a little bit of nous.

I broadly agree with this, but there are ways to make the process effective and ways to make it incredibly error prone, like not having checks to ensure you paste into the correct columns. Obviously there are no such checks here.

Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle

#24

Post by nisegami »

jackvalentine wrote: post #4

Honestly sometimes I just want to go back to paper. Laying out 24 recruitment folders with a cover sheet that has their score in the right order.

I wish we could do a semiconductor-free week or something at my job and revert to pen+paper for a bit (no printers/scanners).

Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle

#25

Post by TeMPOraL »

jjgreen wrote: post #5
roenxi wrote: post #2

> Proposing the motion at this week's meeting, Dr Marks said: "I'm no expert on HR software, but I do know that manually copying and pasting from seven different Excel sheets, all laid out in different ways, is bound to go wrong one day. So who set up the system? Who set up the QA processes and the staff training?" This sounds pretty standard to me. Spreadsheet stacks are actually effective - and often robust if the…

Copy Paste technician , fabulous, up there with Prompt engineer

Well, out of their, say, $50/hr rate, $1 is for the actual labor of copying and pasting, and $49 is for knowing what to copy and where to paste :).

Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle

#26

Post by pasc1878 »

curiousgal wrote: post #22

I don't understand why they're blaming Excel. It seems like a fairly straightforward operational error.

They are blkaming the process that is uncontolled which uses Excel.

They also blam Oriel which is another system

Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle

#27

Post by orwin »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #13
b112 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's insane! These candidates hold people's lives in their hands, and they just hured unqualified candidates!

> and they just hured unqualified candidates Hopefully not unqualified, just not the "best" available

As defined by the interview process.

Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle

#28

Post by TacticalCoder »

People think that Excel is the most used "programming language" in the world. Which may or may not be true.

But the one truth is this: the world runs on broken Excel spreadsheets.

People have no idea. The number of decisions taken higher up the chain based on wrong numbers are beyond belief.

If you've ever been tasked to rewrite a semi-advanced Excel spreadsheet to a dedicated (web)app, you know.

I'm a coder and I do use spreadsheets (not Excel though). Spreadsheets in the hands of programmers are okay.

But thinking that somehow because Joel Spolsky can use advanced Excel features, regular people can too, then you're being completely delusional.

You can't have it both ways: either it's the most used programming language in the world and it has to be used by programmers, or it's a recipe for incorrectness.

Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle

#29

Post by surgicalcolor »

This is such a weird body for comments.

You have devs in here shrugging and saying "hey it works, no big deal" when it comes to a business process. But if it comes to svelte vs react vs whatever it's a butlerian jihad where everyone's accusing eachother of not even knowing how to program.

sometimes I wonder if most of us do the job to play with silly tools rather than actually make shit.

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