No boggle at all

Post #371,901 by crazy 2/27/13 4:33:34 PM Reply	No boggle at all I've spent years automating exactly the type of work described. I sit next to a person who does their job, keying all day, from a variety of sources. They have their own mental business rules that have to be documented. All those cut&pastes of rows of spreadsheet columns, and the occasional cell overwrite killing you happened all the time. They hated me, know I will be automating the task they are doing, so they always exaggerated the difficulty, hoping I will give up. No dice. So they do it very quickly, skipping over and redoing for mistakes that I couldn't catch, then abuse me for asking them to explain what just happened. I was just too slow or stupid to handle it, and obviously when they complained to their boss I'd stop distracting them from their job. I have sat through this performance with DOZENS of people through my career. Most of the time I give up on THEM. I document what they do from and input/output blackbox perspective, and replace it all from scratch. I ALWAYS found errors in current implementation of business rules, either in that they produced obvious erroneous results, or they didn't follow the spec. If I was to tell the customer (always working on a customer system), then we'd have to refund a shitload of money. So we didn't. But if I changed the system to be "correct" in my version of it, then the next month's production run would vary too much from the previous, setup red flags, and then be investigated by the customer. So replacement systems would be bug-for-bug compliant until I could slide the fixes in without being noticed.
Post #371,912 by Another Scott 2/27/13 8:30:23 PM Reply	The scale is the boggle. What boggled me was the fact that an office of JP Morgan was throwing around hundreds of millions or billions of dollars based on simple risk calculations in a spreadsheet that was not checked for accuracy. It shows that management didn't care how Iksil made his money as long as he did so. IOW, management wasn't doing its job but was sitting back and collecting all the rewards. Yeah, that's not really surprising. But still... Cheers, Scott.
Post #371,918 by boxley 2/27/13 9:13:40 PM Reply	nah, largest phone company in the US tracks all of its equipment on excel spreadsheets by lowest cost contractors who are not really skilled and don't really care. Now guess what software is building derivative tranches? Betcha that shit is in there somewhere Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 57 years. meep
Post #371,930 by crazy 2/28/13 6:56:42 AM Reply	Pocket change http://en.wikipedia....eriquest_Mortgage
Post #371,949 by drook 2/28/13 10:20:15 AM Reply	Got out just ahead of that I was working for a company that did mortgage paperwork. We picked up Ameriquest's appraisal business, more than doubling our income. (I think it was more like tripling. It was a lot.) I left the company soon after. Now they're not doing so well. C'est la vie. -- Drew
Post #371,961 by crazy 2/28/13 1:24:56 PM 2/28/13 1:38:47 PM Reply	I was tossed out about 2 years before the peak The 1st year the windows centric project manager tried to replace Oracle/Perl/dozens of linux box parallel processing and my hand picked project successor that I had been training and then working with for years, and gave it to a Windows buddy who attempted to rewrite it for a SQL Server/VB environment with a variety of reporting tools tacked on. It had taken me 6 months to sell/plan it, once sold: 3 months to create the infrastructure (buy big solaris/little linux boxes, Gbit/FC/large disk), while coding dozens of variations of possible production methods using Perl and Oracle and SyncSort and (whatever), created a full month's worth of processing and then optimized it down to a week, threw a chair at my boss when he told me to work SMARTER (thanks towelboy), and then babysat it for 2 month's of productions, then trained my mentee and moved onto my next project, occasionally being called in for design/code meeting for addons. It ran for 3 YEARS and was the largest amount of profit that company had ever seen, at the cost of 20% of a perl/unix programmer and 50% of a clerical assistant/production person. Paid for the lights and rent and a lot of celebrations (of which I was not part of). It took him about a year before he turned it on. In that process he alienated the current staff on purpose, most left and/or were fired, and there were multiple failed monthly productions, in which the company had to write checks to ameriquest in the $300,000 range. After he claimed it was all my system's fault, and then turned his on, they lost the account within a couple of months and destroyed the database division of the company. Poof. Edited by crazy Feb. 28, 2013, 01:38:47 PM EST Expand All History

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