I once made over $1 million developing a program to rescue a small financial services company from its unmanageable mess of Excel sheets.

While I was working on that, the company was busy trying to figure out which other companies the millions of unaccounted excess dollars in their fiduciary account belonged to.

Turns out the boom-got-it-done-in-5-minutes types don't always have a plan for making the big picture work, beyond their current 5-minute problem.

Sounds like business as usual to me.

Non computer people try to solve a problem internally with existing tooling, but the scale gets out of control and they hire a specialist, whether accounting or computer scientist. Most of the jobs I have consist of a company already hacking together a solution from canned software or having a prototype of what they wanted, don't think this is weird at all.

Are you suggesting they should have built a well architected Java program from the start? I'm not so sure.

1 - It's easy to say with monday's newspaper, companies can move fast and then worry about the consequences later if they grow and are succesful. Internal proyects or the whole company can be unsuccessful so you can tag on tech debt and worry about it if it needs to survive, happens all the time. As a curious note, the legal system supports this, companies have limited liability so courts are ok with letting companies that go too deep into the red (tech debt or cash) collapse into 0.

2- Overengineering is also a risk, although usually the failure mode is it never takes off the ground, but what's to say the couldn't have hired a -10x engineer to build their accounts system and then needed to hire an actual 10x engineer to fix the mess?

3- This seems like an accounting problem domain, I think if a company has classically trained accountants you avoid this problem, and if you don't then you get this problem regardless of whether using excel or a programming language. Double entry bookkeeping has been around for centuries. (I'm guessing an accountant helped build the specs for whatever you built for 1M$). Good accountants can handle huge (+1M) companies with pen and paper, and regularly do so with Excel, so I'm not buying that excel was the culprit here.

That said 1M$ is a lot, congrats!

This isn't some spaghetti ERP on Excel or some other blatant overuse of the application. This is tagging some lines on a CSV file to categorize expenses. A few filters, a few formulas, create a summary sheet with SUMIFS or just create a pivot table, done.

Evaluating the problem tells you how complex the solution needs to be. This problem of categorizing basic financial transactions is pretty basic and I'd take the basic approach every time.

Well in this particular case - yeah, excel 100% of the time.

But I think the point here was exploring different paradigms and their trade-offs. I appreciate that a lot, as I think we're stuck in various local optima as an industry - and spreadsheets seem to be one of them (once they pass a certain complexity threshold).

I'm not sold on the "everything in clojure" model here, I think you could accomplish all this does with a script written in $LANG and a little DuckDB (and probably a half dozen other similarly suitable approaches), but again - I appreciate the goal of exploring the solution space, especially when it's using approaches that I'm not that familiar with.

Fair point, and I've certainly been on both sides of this equation!

The Excel approach is absolutely more efficient for one-off tasks or where the goal is simply "get numbers, make decision, move on." No argument there.

Where the programmatic approach shines is when:

1. The same task repeats annually/monthly (like the author's accounting example) 2. The rules or categorizations evolve over time 3. You need an audit trail of how you arrived at conclusions 4. The analysis grows more complex over time

I've seen plenty of Excel wizards whose spreadsheets eventually become their own form of programming - complete with complex macros, VBA, and data models that only they understand. At that point, they've just created an ad-hoc program with a different syntax.

There's a sweet spot for each approach. Sometimes the 5-minute Excel solution is exactly right. Other times, spending an hour on a reusable script saves you 10 hours next year. The real 10x move is knowing which tool fits which situation.

And yes, sometimes we programmers do overthink simple problems because playing with new approaches is fun. I'll cop to that!

But then, who'd invent excel? Maybe we need the compromise and let some people be the 10xcel engineer...

The VisiCalc/Lotus erasure is very strong in this comment.

Wouldn't they fit within the "decades of spreadsheet software tradition"?

> Excel wasn't built out of a small personal project,

But another program with a similar impact -- dBase, the precursor to Microsoft Access, was. Cecil Ratliff wrote it to manage football statistics so he could win his office football pool.