I learned this one with typing in high school. Being the only person who could type proficiently, I was barraged by friends to type out their papers for them. After awhile I just charged people to do it. The next school I went to I made sure not to tell anyone.
The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
391–400 of 435 posts
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
End user "programming" systems are precisely what personal computing was supposed to be about. Aside from spreadsheets and maybe a couple of other things (hangers-on from the business world), that line of inquiry and use has been abandoned. It's worth the development community's time to ask why today we have a larger schism between "programmers" and "users" than we did in the 90s. Let's remember just how popular Hype…
My understanding of that shift is that the average "user" has become less savvy, because of improved UX and an overall increase in the percentage of the population who are "users". This is because over the last 30 years computers have moved out of just the business/academia/enthusiast space into people's homes (and then pockets). The average "user" can't program a computer because we've been able to bring computing t…
Excel is programming a computer. So was Hypercard. Any UX that reduces user "savvy" rather than enhacing it can hardly be said to be improved. A large part of the developer community has a very static idea of what a computer can be or what programming can be. What does it mean to author in the medium and why have we stopped trying to figure it out?
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's got a Bloomberg console and he's typing data manually from a PDF into Excel. That's just got to be the incorrect workflow. If not, there is room for huge improvement in financial tools.
I used to work for a financial services company. Their main product was a 30 year old cobol program used by many large banks. Some of them would use our software to print various reports and then manually enter those printed values in to excel . Even worse, the software could export to a format excel could process so it wasn't necessary in the first place. Don't expect to be disrupting banking anytime soon though. Ba…
> At one point, one of the company's customers did an investigation to see how much it would cost to replace the software, and it was close to 9 figures, and so they decided it was more cost effective just to continue paying the multi-million dollar yearly licenses.
A bank I've worked at had a project to replace lots of bank's legacy (Mainframes and Cobol) with Java on Linux. The project's budget was over 1 billion dollars and it was estimated to take 5 years.
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Starts with R? Checks... retrophin. No. Starts with T. Turing Pharmaceuticals.
Retrophin was his first pharma firm, the one he made after leaving his hedge fund. That firm later sued him. Turing was his second pharma firm. Made soon after his ouster/leaving.
And it was Turing that raised the price of Daraprim, which earned Shkreli the attention and reputation still being echoed in this thread.
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
Starts with R? Checks... retrophin. Shkreli was one of many finance types who have fully drunk the koolaid. He is not alone, and the others too would be prosecuted if people had the time and awareness to be incensed with the culture. In his defense, shkrelli didn’t know he was a tool. On the one hand singing praises of the free market and on the other taking advantage of every loophole someone could find. I mean the…
Finance people don’t think this type of behavior is OK either despite the ridiculous views of some people here. BTW, I could similarly make ridiculous statements about technologists or scientists. I’ve worked number of places and can’t think of a single person out of hundreds that would think this behavior is OK.
I know many those who don’t think it’s ok, and are bothered by it, and many who think he is stupid and didn’t do anything particularly wrong. The morality of it is separated from the legality of it.
The defense on this issue is pretty clear cut, raising the price is not illegal. If there is something illegal, then it should be in a regulation somewhere.
If he is doing something the market is open to, then it’s not a problem and he is doing a service by forcing the market or regulators to respond.
Maybe he was a douche about it, but that’s a stylistic issue, not a practical one.
He did get dinged for securities fraud, not price gouging as I recall.
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any time we find ourselves benefactors of evil, we must advocate against it and thank anyone who may have explained to us where we stand.
Advocating against bad actions is different than going homeless because your parents did something wrong. You can't assume that they didn't and can't assume they deserve any punishment for what their parents do.
If a man does terrible things to support his family, the inevitable destruction of his family falls on his head. Not the other people he ripped off.
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. I've said worse to people over much less myself. And I'm a nice guy too.
You've threatened someone's wife and children because of an alleged crime commited by their husband/father?
On the advice of counsel I invoke my Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, and respectfully decline to answer your question.
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#398People say "use a real database", fine, but where is the visual data entry? Where are the easy adhoc reports? Where are the forms? I guess if you're on Windows you can use Microsoft Access, but that's the only accesible tool I know of that doesn't require a team of programmers or an enterprise license for some Oracle/SAP type monstrosity.
Good manual data entry support is nice, but Excel sacrifices good automated data management to do it. Automating basic read and writes isn't terribly hard if you can find a good library, but it's still far more complicated than it needs to be.
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
using excel isn't not fun, it's just that the mental complexity of excel is offloaded to the user. the user keeps track of the various computations and transformations. anything more than a quick check on some data exponentially taxes the brain leading to an ever increasing dislike of the software being handed someone else's excel sheet is an infuriating experience because they're also handing you whatever convoluted…
In investment banking, one of the first things you are taught is excel formatting and how to write readable excel. How to write clear and concise comments, what color different cell types should be (black for formulas, blue for inputs, green for links to other cells, red for weird formulas), how to structure large files (when to make a new tab vs keeping a monolithic file), when to break up a formula into multiple ce…
They have standardized their mental models
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
In investment banking, one of the first things you are taught is excel formatting and how to write readable excel. How to write clear and concise comments, what color different cell types should be (black for formulas, blue for inputs, green for links to other cells, red for weird formulas), how to structure large files (when to make a new tab vs keeping a monolithic file), when to break up a formula into multiple ce…
They have standardized their mental models
Which cannot be said for software engineers.