Re: [Hampshire] Whatever happened to programming?

Isaac Close wrote:
> --- On Sun, 7/3/10, john lewis <johnlewis@???> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 7 Mar 2010 10:45:29 +0000
>> Samuel Penn <sam@???>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Many programmers are business people who know how to
>> write VB
>>> macros in Excel, who end up being told to turn their
>> spreadsheet
>>> into a business critical application.
>> Done that with SuperCalc.
>>
> I'm a business person and I never use spreadsheets or VB :-)

The *worst* use of spreadsheets I ever came across was in two telcos ($job
consists of net (mail/web) work and telco management and billing systems).
One telco did all thier billing using a room full of spreadsheets on PC's
and another did customer monthly reports again on a room of sheets.

In both cases the sheets were left to run (maybe an hour per sheet) and
someone was expecetd to check and manually edit before saving the output
and starting the next.

In the latter case we replaced the entire half room of PC's with a reporting
tool based around frameMaker running on a Sparc5! It even eliminated the need
for manual aditions as we incorporated the decision logic for the manual
additions into the output!

The big problem with this sort of product is that you have to sell it to the
dept manager and they can only see the down side (automation means less work
means smaller dept means loss of budget and drop in status).
Thankfully in the above case it meant they could expand thier business without
a massive increase in staff and have much more time to talk to customers face
to face etc.

We also tried to sell the same system into various petrochem companies who
do similar things - rooms full of sheets and staff doing repetitive work -
- they *loved* the "Glossy" output and were all smiles until they realised
how much time/effort (read jobs) it would eliminate.

Jacqui