I’ve been on both sides of this as a sysadmin for almost 15 years then as a data analyst. IT has so many requirements and barriers and any end user tool you have free access to will possibly be an easier route than procuring a boutique solution through IT. Yes of course IT will do it proper but that takes longer, just build a tool in excel and use an access database on the file server cause its something you can just immediately do. Yeah its not “right” by IT standards and causes headaches for IT but sometimes it’s whatever gets the job done next week is what’s going to be in the businesses best interest.
Also a lot of these tools are used how they were designed to be used. If a couple people have a function they need fulfilled and some excel tool with macros can provide that in less than a month and save those people a ton of time then I don’t see a problem with it. Just make sure SLA is very clear make it clear they can’t blame IT if there’s problems, offer the best advice for risk management.
At my old job, they had an HR person that was not qualified to be an HR person, and she “accidentally” sent an Excel spreadsheet of everyone’s wages and salaries to the entire company email distro.
- She was not fired, but put on a suspension.
- Don’t know why she had an unsecured Excel file of important information like that.
- Everyone was pissed lol
Everyone was pissed
as someone who had worked in transparent jurisdictions: everyone should absolutely be pissed about not having this info available publicly always in real time.
One of my favorite things to do as a leader is encourage my employees to discuss their salary. Superiors often get pissed before I tell them that “well it’s too late now, and asking them not to is literally illegal.”
👏👏👏
It was the way the information was presented, plus it made everyone realize that there was a pretty huge gap in several people’s salaries, even those in the same job (ie, one engineer made 50k while another made 70k, doing the same job). I agree though, employees should not be punished for discussing pay.
It shouldn’t matter that she revealed wages. Letting the company act like wages should be secret empowers the company to screw employees who don’t realize their value.
In fact, it’s illegal for them to tell non-management employees to keep their wages secret.
As a government employee - everyone’s wages are public record at my job and it causes zero issues.
A friend who is senior by two years found out that a new hiree was getting paid more than he does for the exact same role. Understandably, he was pissed and left.
And that’s exactly why wages should be transparent. So people can make an informed decision if they are valued enough at the company or if they should go somewhere else.
That’s silly, due to inflation almost all our new hires make significantly more than people with 5-10 years of additional experience.
We are having to increase new hire starting compensation by ~10% annually just to get anyone to apply.
Why would you tell your employees how much they make, it will only inflate payroll by ~20%.
Oh no. Actually paying your workers costs money?
Anyways I heard there was a holiday deal on rice at Safeway. I need to get on that. See you around!
Why would you tell your employees how much they make, it will only inflate payroll by ~20%.
GOOOOD! As it should be. Dear god, you just wrote out in public that you aren’t properly paying long term employees their fair share.
If you can’t compete with paying fair wages to all employees then you should go under!
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Hero. Salary negotiations must have been a riot that year lol
I wouldn’t call her a hero. She was wildly incompetent, and screwed up half of the employees’ tax info. I was a single filer with no dependants, but she had me down for married with 4 dependants. She also lost all the forms, so I couldn’t prove I messed up my W2s (or whatever those forms are).
What a hot mess. Were you one of the people that was able to get a salary adjustment in the positives at least?
No :')
Damn, I’m sorry friend. :( I know that sting
Our hr had an unsecured excel file with every employees private personal information like emergency contacts, address, social security number, etc… And it got “got” by a ransomware attack because people still open email attachments blindly…
Well at least if it was ransomware, the information was still probably safe. Ransomware blocks the company’s access to company files by either locking the system or encrypting the files. It usually remains locked until the company agrees to pay a large fee to unlock it. So they may have lost access to that file, but the information isn’t stolen, it’s just unusable
Probably, but the message said if the company didn’t pay the data would be “auctioned off on the dark web.”…
I dunno the liklihood of that actually happening but I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible… After all, they have the key to decrypt it and no reason to assume they didn’t also have the files… Something was hitting cpu and network usage to 100% for several days across several locations… It was a bad time. It’s probably more likely a feint to just install crypto bs on servers while IT is distracted, but still I have no reason to believe it wasn’t possible.
I personally got an Excel sheet emailed to me from HR when I asked how much vacation time I had left.
She didn’t remove the sheets for everyone else though, so I was able to see how much vacation time and sick hours people all had accrued.
The one guy everyone was always pissed at for never being at work of course had like 3 hours of sick time accrued while everyone else had around 200-400 hours (it was union). He used every hour of sick time he accrued whether he was sick or not and let everyone else pick up his slack.
Good, thats what sick time is for…
When you have as much sick time as we were able to accrue it was there for emergencies like not being able to work for a month due to a surgery or something. Not taking a month off every year for the hell of it.
Sure we could take mental health days and personal days and sick days easily whenever people were very understanding and encouraged it. That one employee very much abused it though and it was no secret. People like that are why most employers are stingy with sick time as they can’t be trusted to be responsible with it.
If you only get 5 days of sick leave every year sure go ahead and make sure you use that, but we weren’t in that situation. This employee basically took every second Friday off, and in a job where you can’t just put off your work until the next day someone else had to do your work on top of their own that day.
Sounds like you have too much work for the amount of people if one person leaving cripples you all so hard.
There was enough people to be comfortable even with one or two out, but it’s still inconsiderate to your coworkers to take the day off and make them do your work. People have plans to use their time on their own shit and that gets messed up and interrupted when sick time is used unnecessarily on a regular basis. They don’t care to do the work for some other lazy ass.
Jesus dude. This isn’t an argument on the merits of having sick time available it’s just a dick move to use it when you don’t need it when there’s more than enough time to use when it’s actually needed.
Sounds like the last company I worked for. The only payroll clerk for over 800 staff members was analog as she had been around for so long. She wanted everything faxed or sent by FedEx. She would accidently email these types of files all over the company. The company was in such disarray it was just another day of disfunction for them.
HR says salary info is confidential.
HR says leaking confidential info is a serious offence.
HR commited the very same offence
And gets away with it.
On one of my last jobs they required us to do a straightforward but time consuming task with excel, it was ideal to automate it in software but my manager won’t ask the dev team because he said it would be very expensive and they were focused on more important things. I did it with macros on excel and word and kept it to me and my coworker, so we had like two hours of free time everyday, only had to look like we were busy with the sheet.
It’s unfortunate when they are short sighted like this. They would rather have 8 people do the work over a week that 1 could do in a day with the right fix.
However often there is rarely the resources or the people with the vision in the right role to push for these solutions.
My take is that Excel is great for people to throw together quick and efficient tools for their own use. The problem is when these get distributed and then everyone uses something that has no version control or QA/QC.
I see this a lot because an engineer gets annoyed with IT or existing software restrictions and learns enough VBA to be dangerous. (Spoiler, it me.)
Having worked in 3 companies, Excel sure seems like the most popular database.
Someone in my department suggested that project plans should be moved from Excel to MS Project.
It was 50-50 relief vs panic
And asset management software and internal program GUI and collaborative coding software and even (in one case) version control.
My boss used it for marketing control and CRM at one point. I put a stop to that real quick.
Did you know? Many published indexes (indexes like S&P500 etc…) are computed with excel
I TOTALLY trust their values
When I was in high-school I made an inventory management/pos for my school’s merch shop in excel and vbs. It was the single worst thing I have ever made and how I discovered what feature creep was. Got me a course credit though!
IT guy here, Excel is a data analytics tool, not a database, not a word processor, not a sales system, not a photo album, not a notepad, not a paint program.
If at anytime you are treating Excel as a database, you are doing it wrong, and you deserve me mocking you when asking for help recovering it when it breaks, I won’t as I am not a dick, but if I did, you would deserve it.
If you want a database, build an SQL database, or have someone build it for you, not me.
Excel is a game dev and game test kit.
Like Snakes, Bowman, CimCity, etc
The problem is, people dig to deep into excel functions, some of them could easily build a database or do some programming (if/else), but they know nothing outside of their ms-office -ecosystem.
Just a hint for ms-office devs, why not a low-code-builder with SQL backend. Just call it squirrel or powersql or something.
It’s more than just knowing things outside the ms office ecosystem. People use the tools they have. So when IT locks down the whole system and it takes an act of God to get anything else installed, you find ways to hammer that nail with whatever blunt object you have in hand.
I see you’re in enterprise.
MS Access is a thing…
And it’s terrible.
It’s great at (correspondence) Battleship with a coworker though. Didn’t see this on the “not a…” list. Oh, and (correspondence) Guess Who!
You would be aghast at the sort of horrors my previous place of employment used- not even Excel- Google Sheets for.
Shit, I’ll mock them. I’m too jaded and depressed at this point in my career to give a fuck. I’ll go full Nick Burns on their asses if one of my end users wants to use Excel as a database and expects me to make it work. The may even learn something in the process. It might be the fact that I’m a dick, but everyone figures that out pretty quickly.
It’s not even a good analytics tool. If you submit an academic paper with excel plots in it, I’ll reject that shit without reading it and type “lmaoooooooo…” To the review character limit.
My 12 year old child knows how to use matplotlib and he thinks Santa can fit down a chimney.
It is good enough for financial and marketing analytics, just because there are better tools for scientific applications doesn’t make Excel a bad analytic tool for general use.
It depends on the scale. I’ll agree that excel is a great tool for household finances.
Didn’t the UK’s covid track and trace system break because it was running on excel
Guys, what is excel? Do you mean libre office calc?
I think its some gui version of numpy arrays…
That but in good
Me, being scolded for using ipynb apps to deliver rapid feature turnaround to customers, generating a million dollars in revenue:
Our finance department, tracking that revenue in a 700MB excel spreadsheet which is version controlled by a 13 year old email thread:
wtf are ipynb apps?
It’s when you have Python and breakfast.
If you have to ask, you can’t afford it
Edit - it seems y’all should save up for a sense of humor anyway
- Comment replies should be somewhat relevant to the topic
- Jokes should be funny
- It doesn’t cost money to have a sense of humor
- Jokes should make people laugh
Ok but this is a shitpost community
Root beer.
Excel is a database, application/program with Microsoft forms, notepad, calculation tool, calculation report, sometimes used to make rudimentary sketches when PowerPoint is not convenient.
Imagine if Microsoft gave a shit and actually improved it! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If they did care and tried to improve it, they’d ruin it.
Fair point
Imagine if Microsoft gave a shit and actually improved it!
Excel is one of the few apps MS actually cares about and improves. It’s the reason you can’t replace it with Google Sheets. I’ve tried. You can’t even print mailing labels from Google sheets/docs without renting a plugin that charges a monthly fee. Printing mailing labels has been in Excel for 30 years.
Every behind the scenes (functions/features) change to Excel has been brilliant. Unfortunately every UI change to Excel has been awful.
I still can’t get over the fact that it was only a few weeks ago when I learned that Walter White is the same actor who played dad in Malcolm in the Middle. still blows my mind. What a prolific actor to take on such vastly different roles.
I zoom in on Walter White and try so hard to see Hal Wilkerson in there but I just can’t.
You know… If that is true, it’s possible you may suffer from face blindness
My wife grew up with it her whole life and didn’t realize it was abnormal until she was about 30. Apparently it’s more common than you’d think, and if washer most people have no idea it even exists, even if they have it.
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Yeah man I hear you, you might just be retarded.
There is a skit from Sat Night Live with Brian Cranston and Aaron Paul that is a spoof of their real lives as celebrities. Up to a point he is mild mannered, and then suddenly he gets very dark and serious. He is really good at portraying an aloof person and turning it on a dime. Point is in the that skit you certainly can see both.
If I had a nickel for every utility I worked with that handles billing of capital projects on a spreadsheet, I’d have 2… Which isn’t a lot, but still odd that the backbone of their billing is excel
