[clausok]

Your Excel+vba application’s features remind me of when I joined an investment bank in 2000. I had come from an insurance company where I was considered the Excel\vba wizard, and I was impressed, in the extreme, by my new colleagues’ approach to Excel development. Even during the interview process I had realized that, when it came to vba, I was but a babe in the woods. They had auto-updating code (when you “published” code, all client workbooks downloaded the latest version), code-generated collection classes, interface inheritance, tests, error detection, higher-level functions via Application.Run(), self-contained worksheets with embedded vba code that would operate even if moved to a new workbook.

Inevitably, new hires would be unhappy that they did, in fact, have to write vba code all day and would argue for switching to a better language. Our team manager would say, "Vba gives us a superpower no other language does: we can deploy whatever we want, whenever we want, to whomever we want. In any other language, getting 'Hello World' in front of a user is a six month project."

[osrec]

Not to mention circumventing the usual corporate app deployment BS...

[cc81]

>Inevitably, new hires would be unhappy that they did, in fact, have to write vba code all day and would argue for switching to a better language

JavaScript alone should prove that the "better" language does not win on language design alone (These days it is at least pretty ok)

[markus_zhang]

Back then there were a few book that talked about the "Internals" of VBA and taught a lot of tricks like manipulating the pointer, etc.

But I do believe that people should turn to better tools. I think at least they could use VB, which is a proper language and has support for version control and other stuffs. It's also very easy to use VB to manipulate Excel, much easier than C#.

[AdamM12]

What would the role names be for positions like this at an IB? Been interested in this type of work.

[clausok]

The desk-aligned dev spot is a tough one to land. If you’re not hailing from CalTech, MIT, et al, I suggest the highest-probability strategy is an indirect one: get a client-facing job at hedge fund administrator, get great at Excel+vba; over-deliver for the fund’s CFO and/or traders in all their post-trade questions (that’s why Excel+vba expertise is important: it’s easy to deploy to them as just an Excel file); get recruited. The right spot at a fund administrator is much less competitive, and you get an opportunity to impress the same people you would if you were hired directly onto a desk.

Excel+vba is an odd beast because, nowadays, it's rarely seen as a differentiating skill -- it's not taken seriously -- and yet on almost any trading desk there is an infinite series of todo's where Excel+vba is just the right tool for the job.

[richardcrossley]

Something called "Desk Developer", "Deskdev", "Rapid Application Development" or "RAD".

I was in the Deskdev team in an investment bank for 4 years, great fun and I learned a lot about Excel.

[AdamM12]

Ok cool. Thank you!