Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are blkaming the process that is uncontolled which uses Excel. They also blam Oriel which is another system
are you commenting from a corporate system that censors the word "blame"?
git blamRoyal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
51–60 of 68 posts
Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
#52This 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.
Hey, it’s not just playing with the silly tools. It’s showing how smart I am by displaying my arcane knowledge of the silly tool.
Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
#53I don't understand why they're blaming Excel. It seems like a fairly straightforward operational error.
Yep exactly - nobody thought to double check the original/final sheets when the results looked a bit off?
Assume that ANRO is a "normal" government bureaucracy - any people inclined to double-checking, questioning things, or caring much about the real-world outcomes get systematically weeded out.
Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
#54This 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…
No. Most of us work to deliver
> Here's a universal tool whose potential is limited only by one's imagination
And it crashing, and it being limited in capacity, and not being as flexible as SQL (in areas SQL is good at). It's not a universal tool, good as it is.
Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Often I can do what I need in a few minutes in excel where à programmer would take hours and not give me what I actually asked for. And in excel I can modify and update my work. Where a programme solution is static and needs tons more hours for every change needed. Often we see people claiming that "This new thing is the spreadsheet killer, like ai at the moment. People have been saying this forever but spreadsheets…
There are only two things I've seen that ever came close to actual "spreadsheet killers" - MS Access and computational notebooks (Jupyter, Observable webapp). And it so happens that both are very similar in principle to Excel spreadsheets. They're optimized for certain paradigm (reactive cells, RDBMS CRUD, reactive cells accepting code and outputting rich content), but otherwise don't constrain you - instead, they invite you to build your thing incrementally, figuring your problem out as you build the solution, with full visibility into intermediate states.
The only way AI has a chance of killing spreadsheets is if it replaces a Real Programmers, by becoming a tool that lets anyone interactively build arbitrary apps, for free (on the margin), with near zero turnaround.
Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
No. Most of us work to deliver > Here's a universal tool whose potential is limited only by one's imagination And it crashing, and it being limited in capacity, and not being as flexible as SQL (in areas SQL is good at). It's not a universal tool, good as it is.
By universal tool I meant a general-purpose computer equipped with tools letting you program it.
> No. Most of us work to deliver
I mean, yes, of course - but "playing with silly tools" is one of many methods of delivering without losing your mind in the process.
Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
#57>An error meant "rank" was confused with the interview score
We'll... There's your problem. It doesn't matter what tool you use if the definition of the system is broken.
Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
#58Reminds me of the excel-bungling during the covid pandemic.
>A million-row limit on Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet software may have led to Public Health England misplacing nearly 16,000 Covid test results, it is understood. The data error, which led to 15,841 positive tests being left off the official daily figures, means than 50,000 potentially infectious people may have been missed by contact tracers and not told to self-isolate.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/05/how-excel-m...
Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
#59This 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.
Excel is superb for automating/number crunching short lived business processes or those that are one offs or change rapidly. Especially if you don't have technical resources available to do it any other way.
The biggest issue they had was not understanding that the data from one area (Wales) was in a different format from the others - an integer that represented rank (lowest being best) rather than a test score - that would probably still not been noticed if they'd used something else.
Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Often I can do what I need in a few minutes in excel where à programmer would take hours and not give me what I actually asked for. And in excel I can modify and update my work. Where a programme solution is static and needs tons more hours for every change needed. Often we see people claiming that "This new thing is the spreadsheet killer, like ai at the moment. People have been saying this forever but spreadsheets…
> Often I can do what I need in a few minutes in excel where à programmer would take hours and not give me what I actually asked for
That's likely not down to the tool, more likely a complex requirement you understand but they don't. (And are you sure you're getting the right answer? IIRC an analysis showed 10% of spreadsheets have errors - devs do care about good results, and that does take extra time)
> Where a programme solution is static and needs tons more hours for every change needed.
Hmm. Sounds like there's something wrong here, with your guys or some aspect of the business (and sure, excel is not a bad tool, just to be clear).