[PRL] The Importance of Excel

[Mitchell Wand]

Indeed. I was going to shoutout to the CodeAcademy folks as the foremost
proponents of the "everyone should code"  movement.

Of course, it is unrealistic to expect everyone to learn to write _good_
code.  But maybe, even if they write enough cr*p code, they will learn to
recognize some of the pitfalls.  "Why am I entering all this stuff by hand?
 There must be a better way.  Let me walk down the hall and ask somebody"

Oh wait, this is the real world.   Got carried away there for a minute.

--Mitch




On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt <samth at ccs.neu.edu>wrote:

> 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
>
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