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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

#31

Post by onionisafruit »

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

Is prompt engineer a derogatory term for people who spend their work day at a shell prompt? If so, I can own up to being a prompt engineer. Or maybe it’s an engineer who does their work promptly. In that case, I’m not sure I qualify.

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

#32

Post by pjc50 »

surgicalcolor wrote: post #29

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.

There's a very "bikeshedding" property at work where the fewer "real" consequences come from a decision, the more heated the discussion gets because it's purely opinionated.

(there are also a number of HN commentators who are reliably noisily wrong about things, but not in such a blatant way that they get obliterated in downvotes, and one of them started that top level thread)

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

#33

Post by TeMPOraL »

surgicalcolor wrote: post #29

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.

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

Yes? I thought this is common knowledge.

Here's a universal tool whose potential is limited only by one's imagination, and yet most of the jobs in our profession are at best boring - the high-paying ones usually involve making actively harmful things that shouldn't exist in the first place (see e.g. whole adtech for starters), and most of the rest are so mired in office politics or business constraints that the outcomes are guaranteed to be shit. A lot of strangeness in the dev culture can be viewed as coping mechanisms.

Meanwhile, after doing this work long enough, you end up realizing that disturbingly many SaaS tools offer much less utility and worse ergonomics than an Excel spreadsheet.

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

#34

Post by pjc50 »

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…

Nobody cares about inefficient or brittle process that produce reasonable results, but when you mess up the careers of a number of people, someone's going to take a look at the process.

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

#35

Post by pjc50 »

DharmaPolice wrote: post #20
codeulike wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spreadsheet stacks are actually effective - and often robust if the Copy Paste technician has a little bit of nous This is true. Sounds like they have cobbled together a system using Excel because thats why you have to do when processes change all the time. The alternative is to find a 'proper' HR system to handle all the weird custom processes which is a massive three year project that costs tens of millions and the…

>IT people complain about people cobbling things together in Excel but in the short and medium term thats usually the only way for people to get shit done This is true, and why I think it's a shame we never got a real replacement for Microsoft Access (not necessarily the functionality of Access but its intended purpose).

If only there was a simple system for producing a database-driven set of screens in a webapp. It's the one thing which seems to have got worse since the eras of dBASE and FoxPro.

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

#36

Post by mananaysiempre »

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

“Typical process latency: Someone copies and pastes data from a thing into another thing”[1]. Jokes aside, though, I don’t think it’s fair to criticise people for using the only user-accessible interapplication communication channel the industry has universally agreed to make work and not use as lock-in leverage.

The spreadsheets being in different formats and lacking additional sheets that’d automatically reformat the data the way the next step needs is something I’d criticise, but I undertstand how that might be nonobvious if you aren’t lazy enough to think about automating everything you possibly can.

[1] https://xkcd.com/2565/

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

#37

Post by tompccs »

I'm sure Byzantine HR processes are constantly being bungled, but you almost never hear about it. These processes only exist because every hiring decision needs a paper trail to show compliance with a myriad of employment and discrimination law. Next time you wonder why orgs seem to have a high concentration of talent when small, and then get diluted with deadweight as they grow, know that this is one of the reasons why.

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

#38

Post by tight-ship »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #33
surgicalcolor wrote: post #29

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.

> sometimes I wonder if most of us do the job to play with silly tools rather than actually make shit. Yes? I thought this is common knowledge. Here's a universal tool whose potential is limited only by one's imagination, and yet most of the jobs in our profession are at best boring - the high-paying ones usually involve making actively harmful things that shouldn't exist in the first place (see e.g. whole adtech for…

It's just a reflection of humanity in general. Nothing special.

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

#39

Post by jjgreen »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #25
jjgreen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :).

If done by a civil servant (government employee), that would be grade AA (Admin Assistant) or AO (Admin Officer). An AO in London gets £24k/year, which is around £11.50/h, or $14/h

https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...

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

#40

Post by HPsquared »

jjgreen wrote: post #39
TeMPOraL wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :).

If done by a civil servant (government employee), that would be grade AA (Admin Assistant) or AO (Admin Officer). An AO in London gets £24k/year, which is around £11.50/h, or $14/h https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...

That's what they get, but their agency probably bills them out at £50/h
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