[eru]

Any complicated spreadsheet might be a bug ridden mess, but at least it's one the finance guys understand and can augment themselves.

Alternatively they could wait for in-house IT to take a few years and millions of pounds (add going running over schedule and budget, too) to produce a bug ridden mess that misses.

[lmkg]

Programmers tend to look at shitty programs and imagine better ways that it could have been done... In practice the competitor to a shitty program is not a better program, but no program at all. Even shitty software can still make the world a better place, and the preponderance of half-assed bug-ridden brain-dead garbage software should be seen as a good thing.

[bald]

thank you. I have the feeling that many participants in this overall chauvinistic discussion here see themselves as artists that always produce perfect outcomes, ignoring the history and productivity of the software actually in place.

[eru]

And on this positive note, you might want to have a look at efforts to make spreadsheets better: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/improvi...

[eru]

Hell, we even look at good programs and imagine we could have done them better.

[dsfyu404ed]

>but at least it's one the finance guys understand and can augment themselves.

And more importantly it enables the "money people" and the "1s and 0s people" to work together throughout the software life-cycle. When the people who input the data understand what's going in and the people who read the output know what should come out the black box in the middle is a lot easier to create and maintain.