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Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

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Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#91

Post by noobhacker »

sevensor wrote: post #18
noobhacker wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are wedded to Excel because they've spent a lot of time learning it and don't want their skills to become obsolete. The resistance is rooted in psychological / political reasons, not technical ones.

I disagree. For users who aren't going to make the leap to "real" programming, spreadsheets are a huge boon. Excel is the only thing many domain experts can use to turn their knowledge into a computational model. Sure, there are tons of problems compared to models implemented in general-purpose programming languages, and we love to complain about the atrocities committed in Excel, but nobody's yet managed to devise a…

I agree 100% that Excel is best for people who aren't going to make the leap#. My point is that domain experts should* make the leap to "real" programming, especially R to handle data analysis.

Excel is faster to get started. But for advanced tasks, the time it takes to learn Excel / R is about the same.

A big reason why people don't make the leap is because they already spent too much time becoming an Excel expert. Indeed, for young analysts with no baggage, a lot of people learn and use R instead.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#92

Post by sct202 »

d--b wrote: post #66

Finance dev guy here. Excel's dominance in the field is because it is an _application container_ that _non_ dev people can use. The workflow is this: - old trader guy says to his junior guy: "hey can you look into xxx." - junior trader guy says: "sure I'll make a spreadsheet for it" - old trader guy: "great your model is all I need, let's trade" - several weeks later, IT guy says: "hey you're running a $100m book out…

Where I work, we get to the part IT guy part, and then the quote comes out to be like $200k+ (and 6 months) to duplicate a SAS program, Excel spreadsheet, or Access database that an analyst hacked together in their spare time.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#93

Post by wooly_bully »

djtriptych wrote: post #44

Watch some youtube vids of Excel pros moving around the UI quickly. There's no other UI I can think of where so much is being done so quickly except maybe a bash pro. America's favorite villain Martin Shkreli was pretty amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw&feature=youtu.be...

Watching someone who was very adept in Vim keybindings (specifically navigating in visual mode) was impressive the first time.

Immediately started learning it that day.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#94

Post by osrec »

philipov wrote: post #47
osrec wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. In the long term, reg fines and dev costs balance out.

Citation please.

Pretty much every rogue trading scandal in the last few years is caused by some guy coming to the front office from the back and gaming the system with knowledge of its weaknesses. In more or less every case, poor front office controls, systems or data practices were identified as the root cause. Example https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/business/...

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#95

Post by Balgair »

djtriptych wrote: post #44

Watch some youtube vids of Excel pros moving around the UI quickly. There's no other UI I can think of where so much is being done so quickly except maybe a bash pro. America's favorite villain Martin Shkreli was pretty amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw&feature=youtu.be...

I'm ok with vi, and ol' Martin 'wurmtongue' Shkreli is pretty good, but what is more amazing is that he has people watching him stream. When you try telling your uncle at thanksgiving (who 'dabbles' in finance) that someone like Grimma there would stream his analysts, let alone that people would watch him, they look at you like you have 10 green heads. Shkreli there is a perfect example of a generation gap.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#97

Post by JustAnotherPat »

sokoloff wrote: post #51
adambard wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're putting Excel-sized data in Hadoop, something has gone seriously wrong in your IT department's decision-making process. It does make for a nice parable about the dangers of shiny-new-thing-syndrome though.

They're practicing RDD -> "Résumé Driven Development"

you laugh, but a guy who knows Hadoop is worth more than a guy who doesn't all else being equal

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#98

Post by codingdave »

d--b wrote: post #66

Finance dev guy here. Excel's dominance in the field is because it is an _application container_ that _non_ dev people can use. The workflow is this: - old trader guy says to his junior guy: "hey can you look into xxx." - junior trader guy says: "sure I'll make a spreadsheet for it" - old trader guy: "great your model is all I need, let's trade" - several weeks later, IT guy says: "hey you're running a $100m book out…

Excel is old-school Business Intelligence. We don't need to make a better spreadsheet, we need to make a better toolkit for data-driven decisions. There is very little reason that all users need to engage with their data in a grid of cells. When BI tools are as usable and flexible as Excel, that is when Excel will dwindle.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#99

Post by [deleted] »

fny wrote: post #68
threatofrain wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand is when shops start stressing the scalability of Excel, such as accountancy shops that share their spreadsheets around through primitive systems of locking (even some of the big 10 accountancies do this), why they never considered anything like Access. The jump is straight from Excel to full-on DB backend, with no transition in the middle.

The transition isn't free. Additional software means more technical overhead. Now you need to worry about training your teams to understand and maintain an Access DB instead of pure spreadsheets. You'll now also have to worry about hiring people who'll be able to adapt to the new system. You'll probably need to hire a full time DBA too. Also, if it ain't broke, why fix it? I feel like a transition to a new system at…

[deleted]

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#100

Post by [deleted] »

codingdave wrote: post #98
d--b wrote: post #66

Finance dev guy here. Excel's dominance in the field is because it is an _application container_ that _non_ dev people can use. The workflow is this: - old trader guy says to his junior guy: "hey can you look into xxx." - junior trader guy says: "sure I'll make a spreadsheet for it" - old trader guy: "great your model is all I need, let's trade" - several weeks later, IT guy says: "hey you're running a $100m book out…

Excel is old-school Business Intelligence. We don't need to make a better spreadsheet, we need to make a better toolkit for data-driven decisions. There is very little reason that all users need to engage with their data in a grid of cells. When BI tools are as usable and flexible as Excel, that is when Excel will dwindle.

[deleted]
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