Senior Excel Programmer
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I really never said that there is NO use for excel access and whatever other tool. I understand that each has it's place. But, what is more likely in this situation? Is it just coinsedence that there is only 1 other job posting in the worldthat matches this title? Or is it more likely that a 5min hack has turned into a business application or whatever? What is more likely for a small business? It is pretty obvious that they must do a bulk of the work in Excel, and maybe it works for them. That's not the point.
The point is there IS a time and place for every concieveable solution to every problem. And there may be MANY good solutions to the problem that will solve the problem in it's own way. If you were asked to create a program that output "Hello World" what would you do? The project requirements are pretty wide open there. You have to ask yourself, why are they asking me to do this, what are the future uses of this application, what tools are available to me, what resources are available to me. They could for example say. We just need to see this message once and never use it again, or they may say, I need this message to appear on all our platforms/OS's, and our website. And in the future we want this message displayed in 100 different languages. This is still pretty wide open. But what are your tools?
In this case, they are asking you to perform advanced reporting. And you are to use the tools that they have. Big deal. But more than likely things can be done better. There is always a better way to do things no matter how you do them. Since they are looking for an advanced Excel user that leads me to think they don't have anybody there that can do that, or maybe they do and justneed more. Then again, why would you need multiple people doing reporting for a small business if their system is easy to use.
There is a reason large businesses use the more robust solutions, and that also should be more obvious, they have more people, more money to throw around, and more needs. They also expect the solution to be reliable.
Part of you job as an analyst is also to tell the client what he is asking for should not be done, and provide alternate solutions that better solve the problem, afterall that is why you are there, to offer your expertise. If you went into every initial project start-up meeting and at the end said "Sure, we can give you EXACTLY what you want" I doubt that you would be of much use to most of the clients. "He just agrees with everything we say, we must be doing things right!"
Sometimes you have to stop a WTF before it happens, sometimes the same WTF in one situation is perfect for another.
I was looking for this code for years!
String jarret = "Brillant";
and now my life is complete!
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[quote user="Jeff S"]I get so fed up when people make excuses and blame their own shitty code on other factors. It's never their fault, it's always what they work in. It's too simple. Too complicated. Too easy to use. Too hard to use. It writes bad code for you. It doesn't write enough code for you. It forces you to write bad code. It forces you to use a certain indenting style that you don't like. It doesn't support X. It only supports Y ... and on and on and on ....
Be a man. take responsibility and stop making excuses. Prove that you are a real programmer and get it done. And, of course, by that same token, the person deciding to use the wrong tool for the job of course gets equal blame when things go wrong.
It's about people, their attitude, their decisions, and their skills - NOT the technology that they ultimately use.
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Equal blame for dictating the wrong tool for the job? That's rather foolish. Ex: I tell you that we need an application to do some magnificent task that is only feasible on modern hardware but I want you to do it in the confines of an old Pac-Man board and it needs to run very quickly (where I define very quickly), then after you fight with me on this and say we need more modern hardware to do it properly, and I tell you to do it anyway, you go to work. You fail. And thus, 50% of the blame falls on me for dictating the wrong tool/hardware and 50% of the blame lands on you for being a "fake programmer"? Come on...
I agree that people use the tools they use to explain their own shortcomings but there are very real limitations imposed by the tool you select. If you select the wrong tool, even a "real programmer" might not be able to work around it.
sincerely,
Richard Nixon
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As entertaining as the debate has been to read...
Has anyone applied for the job yet?
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[quote user="obediah"]
For most people in the real world, that's just not feasible.
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There are also some basic problems with long-term planning: when your company is small, it isn't easy. I went from losing $40,000 a year to making $100,000 a year over the course of six months. Later, I went from $180,000 a year to $70,000 a year in about four months. Eventually, I went from $80,000 a year to zero in a single day. Small companies have massive changes in revenue and profitability over very short timeframes, and while you might recognise the need for a half-million dollar project today, you can't guarantee you'll have the half million dollars to build it. All you can guarantee is what you have in your hand right now.
So the five-minute project is sometimes all you can really handle. It might not be the best way to do things, but if it's the best you can do right now, you don't have much choice.
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[quote user="Richard Nixon"][quote user="Jeff S"]I get so fed up when people make excuses and blame their own shitty code on other factors. It's never their fault, it's always what they work in. It's too simple. Too complicated. Too easy to use. Too hard to use. It writes bad code for you. It doesn't write enough code for you. It forces you to write bad code. It forces you to use a certain indenting style that you don't like. It doesn't support X. It only supports Y ... and on and on and on ....
Be a man. take responsibility and stop making excuses. Prove that you are a real programmer and get it done. And, of course, by that same token, the person deciding to use the wrong tool for the job of course gets equal blame when things go wrong.
It's about people, their attitude, their decisions, and their skills - NOT the technology that they ultimately use.
[/quote]
Equal blame for dictating the wrong tool for the job? That's rather foolish. Ex: I tell you that we need an application to do some magnificent task that is only feasible on modern hardware but I want you to do it in the confines of an old Pac-Man board and it needs to run very quickly (where I define very quickly), then after you fight with me on this and say we need more modern hardware to do it properly, and I tell you to do it anyway, you go to work. You fail. And thus, 50% of the blame falls on me for dictating the wrong tool/hardware and 50% of the blame lands on you for being a "fake programmer"? Come on...
I agree that people use the tools they use to explain their own shortcomings but there are very real limitations imposed by the tool you select. If you select the wrong tool, even a "real programmer" might not be able to work around it.
sincerely,
Richard Nixon[/quote]
Sorry -- I misphrased that ... I meant that just as you can blame the programmer for doing a crappy job, you can also (or instead of in different cases) blame the person choosing the wrong tool. In any given case, I suppose it could be 50/50, but usually it probably is one or the other or varying degrees of both. I didn't mean to imply that it's always 50% of the blame for each!
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[quote user="Jeff S"]Which is worse: trying to force Excel to do more than it should, or hiring a DBA, business analyst, a programmer and buying servers and licenses to install Oracle and enterprisey business intelligence tools and spending 10 months on a project when all you need is an accountant, Excel and 10 minutes to set up a few worksheets?[/quote]
No, the real question should be:
"Which is worse: trying to force Excel to do more than it should, or {hiring DBA | buying Oracle | etc}, or not finding the Open Source tools that are free and a good intermediate between Excel and Oracle?"
Hire ONE good consultant with experience in OpenOffice, OpenRPT, and Postgres, and the expense of buying Oracle (and the hefty servers required to support it) or even Excel becomes a WTF in itself. You don't need all that "enterprisey goodness" to build apps that scale...
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Senior HTML Programmer - was that on the Internet, Usenet or Bitnet platform?
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[quote user="donazea"]
Senior HTML Programmer - was that on the Internet, Usenet or Bitnet platform?
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Rofl ... I like the personal page best
http://www.dm.net/~sharan/
http://www.dm.net/~sharan/resume.html
