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0 pointsmratzloff8y ago0 comments

A long time ago I did the same work with banks. The effect was the same. It was amazing to me how bank employees could somehow find a way to regularly insert ASCII control characters into a CSV value.

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robterrin8y ago· 1 in thread

On a consulting project a few years ago, I was brought in to help a Fortune 500 energy company make sense of the value at risk model that one guy had built over 20 years in VBA. Most of it was pulling from excel spreadsheets brokers would send daily with prices. What. A. Nightmare.

It was hard to decide what I hated most about the project. The mind numbing stupidity of it. That fact that managers had allowed this single point of failure, and then let the guy leave. Or... that it was all a fictitious dance, pursued because spinning off their trading operations, would get them millions in tax subsidies.

emerongi8y ago

I was introduced to programming by my father. He's a business analyst of sorts, so naturally he only knows VBA.

After he left his job, some poor soul had to inherit his massive collection of VBA scripts, which more or less automated his day-to-day work. I think he showed the new guy what buttons to press on his spreadsheets, but I can't imagine he understood any of the Excel-fu my father had done. The legacy architecture that is tied to Excel in all sorts of businesses.. it's crazy.

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