Can you elaborate? I understand the reasoning "we need to grow no matter the cost, will deal with problems when they arise", but deliberately sabotaging yourself doesn't sound reasonable.
For a number of reasons (some of them actually fairly substantial), spreadsheets are the only end-user programming tool that caught on and endured, so users will often choose them. It’s not even that they won’t need to find/hire/allocate programmers, it’s that using them doesn’t seem like a big deal at all.
Of course, just because you told yourself you aren’t doing a software project doesn’t mean you’re not prone to the standard problems of managing those, but the incubation period for many of them is long enough to catch a lot of non-practicioners unaware. I don’t think telling people to leave it to the professionals is the answer, for what it’s worth,—I just don’t see how we get from here to a world where one could interpolate between systems and end-user software more gracefully.
> It’s not even that they won’t need to find/hire/allocate programmers, it’s that using them doesn’t seem like a big deal at all.
I don't understand why it doesn't seem like a big deal, knowing the limitations of spreadsheets. The spreadsheet experts have to know that it will be spaghetti in a decade, right?
I still think the solution for unifying those is to use a database as a backend, with the spreadsheets merely being a frontend for that backend. It does require the people to come somewhat closer to the software, though. I don't know that software can reasonably work with the ill-defined schema of spreadsheets.
not op but probably because some people are so used to using spreadsheets that even if you built them a database with custom visualizations, they'd ask for spreadsheet export.
Not op but that's one of a milder example. Some management people prefer the look and feel administration to be excel-like, even able to do data modification like excel.
Some even worse that they require the data to be in excel since that's all they know.
Of course, just because you told yourself you aren’t doing a software project doesn’t mean you’re not prone to the standard problems of managing those, but the incubation period for many of them is long enough to catch a lot of non-practicioners unaware. I don’t think telling people to leave it to the professionals is the answer, for what it’s worth,—I just don’t see how we get from here to a world where one could interpolate between systems and end-user software more gracefully.