[PRL] The Importance of Excel

[Sam Tobin-Hochstadt]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 11:36 AM, Matthias Felleisen
<matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
> On Feb 14, 2013, at 11:26 AM, John Clements wrote:
>
>> requires time and development resources that people don't choose to allocate to the problems.
>
>
> Saving $500K on a high-quality programmer to turn this financial model into a properly designed program is far cheaper than losing $1B later on. Or as Realm of Racket puts it, a week of "programming" can easily save you an hour of thought.

I think there are two reasons that this doesn't happen.  One is that
the advantage is not always this clear-cut -- most spreadsheets don't
lose $1B.  But more importantly, having a programmer in the loop
implies communication between the analyst/trader and the programmer,
and what Excel allows is for the trader to do the programming
themselves.  Even if the bank had many great programmers, there would
still be such spreadsheets created merely to avoid that overhead,
unless it gets thoroughly banned by the company (which is maybe what
happens at Jane Street, but I bet they use Excel too).

The solution is not hiring high-quality programmers, but thinking of
programming as a fundamental skill that everyone who works with
numbers needs.

Sam