[jimbokun]

One of my first full time software engineering jobs was working on the trading floor of a bank, sitting next to the currency traders.

I was hired by the head of Market Risk Management, whose job was to make sure the bank didn't lose too much money on any given day. He hired me because he did not trust the officially approved IT department to write the code to implement his algorithms. One example: they got something wrong because they did not understand mathematical precedence operations, like multiplication over addition.

So one need was to get all the trades as input to the market risk calculations. This was early 2000s, and I installed Apache with Perl CGI on a PC under the desk, and created a little app for the traders to enter trades and track their positions. The traders started favoring this to the official IT solution because it was easier to use and see their positions.

All of this to say, yes, figuring out how to bypass IT is an important function in a lot of corporate environments.

And back to Excel: the traders used it for all of their calculations and simulations. We tried to work with them by giving them tools that plugged into Excel so they could leverage it along with what they were already doing.

[steve1977]

Was also working in trading floor support (as IT) in the early 2000s. We actually even had proper Excel add-ins (programmed in C++) that provided special functions and also connected to backend systems as far as I remember.

[sancarn]

> We tried to work with them by giving them tools that plugged into Excel

This is probably one of the best ideas out there. If companies built a bunch of Excel Addins to leverage business systems, that would be revolutionary for many businesses.