Excel is one of the most successful pieces of software of all time, so it's an odd choice for a punching bag. Plus, the tone of this article is (unintentionally, I'm sure) off-putting, particularly:
> You know what happens with Excel. Karen from accounting builds a “simple” spreadsheet to track expenses. Six months later, it’s a 47-sheet monster with circular references and VLOOKUP formulas that would make a mathematician weep. The company depends on it, nobody understands it...
It sounds like Karen did a valuable service to the company. She combined a technical skill set with her domain knowledge to create a system that was so successful that the company now depends on it. Cleaning up the technical debt seems like a task that's well worth the cost.
> ...And when it breaks (not if, when), guess who gets called to fix it?
I'm not sure, honestly. It depends on whether you want the fix being done by a resource you consider to be a cost center or a value center. The former will do the cleanup job for bottom dollar. The latter would team up with Karen to amplify the project's impact while cleaning it up.
For these reasons I think your analogy is not effective. I don't disagree with your thesis, though; I prefer code in almost all cases. But that's just me. I know for certain, though, that if I had stock options in that company in this hypothetical scenario I'd rather keep Karen around than whoever fixes the VLOOKUP syntax. And if visual tools are what empowers Karen... well, there you go.
0cf8612b2e1e · 2h ago
I too never get the Excel hate. Without Excel-what do you expect non programmers to do? They sit in front of a computer all day long-would you prefer they use paper? Official IT resources are a joke and will never deliver something so understandable and malleable as Excel. Sure, the official IT app may be done the right way, but it will quickly become outdated as business processes change and the maintenance budget disappears.
bryanrasmussen · 46m ago
I mean I hate Excel - for me. Not for anyone else. I think it is a great piece of software and I only wish I could make something as successful. But I definitely hate working with it.
iLemming · 10m ago
> Excel is one of the most successful pieces of software of all time, so it's an odd choice for a punching bag.
So is Photoshop and Google Maps - the point of the article isn't bashing on Excel, it's about choosing the wrong tool for a job.
betaby · 1h ago
> Excel is one of the most successful pieces of software of all time
This is constantly repeated truisms, and yet I don't use it and have no plans using it. I'm certain I'm not alone.
Excel is counterintuitive and not 'consumable' as the opposite to SQLite. Surely I understand it not the same. Also I suspect most of the Excel users use it like CVS editor.
narcraft · 42m ago
Anyone who hasn't used Excel is totally out of touch with reality (constrained to developed world). Excel is counterintuitive to whom? What intuition does it upset? It's a grid of cells. Each cell
can reference any other. You can immediately see the definition of any cell when selecting it. I'd wager that it's used as a presentation or modeling tool far more than as a CSV editor. Its dynamic aggregated views, what-if scenarios, charting and dashboarding hardly could be replicated with SQLite or CSV tools alone. Surely not as seamlessly or intuitively as Excel.
uticus · 29m ago
Agreed, it has permeated every single industry in the developed world. Professional software developers have been known to reach for it, in a pinch, over dozens of other known and much more powerful tools.
The immediate feedback and visual layout make it the definition of "killer app." Jupiter notebooks has been trying to replicate the magic for years. Entire businesses and industries are built around selling products to successfully replicate what was originally living in a spreadsheet somewhere.
uticus · 33m ago
> I don't use it and have no plans using it. I'm certain I'm not alone.
Too easy to refute. Treating "Excel" as actually "spreadsheet processing," the software has been so consistently and hugely popular that everything from early PDAs [0] to Google Sheets / iCloud Numbers has supported it. Every type of personal computing device has it, from graphic calculators [1] to laptops to tablets to PDAs to many cell phones.
> I suspect most of the Excel users use it like CVS editor.
Like some classes of addictive chemical compounds, you may start with this but quickly find it is the gateway to other habits.
I don't see how this response is relevant. XYZ can still be the most successful even if you don't use it. Even if 1,000,000 people don't use it.
I feel like I'm hearing "Hundreds of people who don't like Elvis can't be wrong". And I don't even like Elvis!
TZubiri · 1h ago
Tell me what other piece of software gives so much turing-complete power to non-technical users.
"Karen" can literally write programs with little training, there's memory, there's functions, there's references, excel is the best.
betaby · 1h ago
Problem arises when "Karen" leaves the company. Then the company asks the "IT guy" to "help" with that Excel sheet on a shared. Again, as I highlighted Excel sheets is not a 'consumable' software. OK to use for one time things, but in a long run it's most likely a mistake.
afiori · 43m ago
Famously Jane's Street started by using excel automation for its core trading business.
I do not particularly like excel, I find it interesting but often obtuse and limited in annoying ways and I agree that for an established workflow using "proper" code is generally better. But imho where Excel excels is in dynamic exploration and supporting decision making, where the type of analysis and visualisations you might want to do can change radically and quickly
nyeah · 22m ago
We never ever see this scenario happen with code :-)
fellowniusmonk · 1h ago
The real problem is that even though most problems are actually text problems (or can be represented by text chars) we don't have version control with the same level of granularity for spreadsheets.
inetknght · 1h ago
Really? What's a database? A spreadsheet. Databases can have version control, backups, etc.
And, what's git? A spreadsheet can be committed to git.
Version control for spreadsheets? It'd be awesome to have on its own, but it's also not hard to add it on top of spreadsheets' existing features.
afiori · 51m ago
It is often said that xlsx and docx files are basically zipped folders of XML files and assets, I wonder how effective it would be to add the decompressed forms to git to see and track changes (or similarly for git to show diffs for the files inside a tar/zip
thankyoufriend · 36m ago
Not hard at all as it turns out. I had to do this a few years back to extract PBI metadata (metric names, queries, data sources, etc.) from of our dashboards.
brendoelfrendo · 1h ago
>> ...And when it breaks (not if, when), guess who gets called to fix it?
>I'm not sure, honestly. It depends on whether you want the fix being done by a resource you consider to be a cost center or a value center. The former will do the cleanup job for bottom dollar. The latter would team up with Karen to amplify the project's impact while cleaning it up.
You're right that the answer is "it depends." In the world of risk management and audit, what Karen has created is called a "user-developed application." Her employer should give her a big pat on the back, and then take a step back to decide 1) if this Excel spreadsheet is mission critical, 2) if it is, who will maintain it, and 3) whether its importance justifies building a formal IT solution to support the business function (either in-house or using COTS software).
I agree that Karen did nothing wrong! She found a process that could be improved or automated, and was able to use technology to do it. If someone is caught off guard when the Excel file goes kaput, then that's not Karen's problem nor is it her fault; it's her employer's responsibility to pay attention to their own business requirements.
antisthenes · 2h ago
> It sounds like Karen did a valuable service to the company. She combined a technical skill set with her domain knowledge to create a system that was so successful that the company now depends on it. Cleaning up the technical debt seems like a task that's well worth the cost.
The technical debt here was solved by creating a complex Excel worksheet. The sheet is the solution.
For small companies where these Excel monsters get created, it is the #1 best way (read - cheapest) to solve technical debt, which, before Excel, was probably a bunch of arcane manual processes that took 5x as long with worse accuracy.
jdauriemma · 2h ago
Good point, though not all spreadsheets are created equal. Some get quite unmanageable, and that can be a productivity bottleneck over time (unless you're not really adding new use cases)
Ezhik · 2h ago
Maybe the real problem to solve is not killing Excel but providing a pathway for load-bearing Excel sheets to grow into full applications, development practices and all.
jdauriemma · 2h ago
I feel like this is doable with a good LLM-assisted coding tool, but it's just a hunch.
TZubiri · 1h ago
"I'm not sure, honestly. It depends on whether you want the fix being done by a resource you consider to be a cost center or a value center. The former will do the cleanup job for bottom dollar. The latter would team up with Karen to amplify the project's impact while cleaning it up."
This is not the first time I see developers berating non-technical users, and I like the thesis that they will function as cost-centers that will do a cleanup job instead of teaming up with the user. It's like they will attempt to "do the work" in a binary fashion, making the "correct" choices, often focused on technical factors, like which library to use or what algorithm, instead of focusing on the business domain.
I also see this attitude when facing technical issues or bad code as if it wasn't our job to deal with bad code (and as if non-bad code existed)
taeric · 4h ago
I'm super sympathetic to this. Used to cynically point out that Excel was the most popular "notebook like" interface for computers.
That said, there are a few points against this as a complaint. First, is the incredibly important point that many many tools are people rediscovering pivot tables. There was a fun rant a while back about "your startup is just a pivot table." Hilarious read.
After that, visual workflows are clearly easier for people to understand. Just look at the directions you get with any "self assembled" furniture. Some of that, I'm sure, is to avoid having to translate a lot? Hard not to argue that it is still probably the more effective way to communicate things.
My final caveat is that the symbolic nature of program code is one that is largely lost on people. Specifically, people seem to think the software is independent of the execution environment that is necessary to understand in the language they are using.
diflartle · 3h ago
> There was a fun rant a while back about "your startup is just a pivot table." Hilarious read.
I'd love to read this, but can't seem to find it. Any idea where I could find it at?
Something1234 · 3h ago
I think it’s an outtake from the “You suck at excel talk” by Joel Spoelsky
taeric · 2h ago
I can't find where I thought I read this. I'm assuming I must have seen a transcript of this speech, once? Regardless, I'm fairly confident this is what I was remembering. Thanks!
Ezhik · 2h ago
If anything we need more Excels. Excel is coding for people who don't even know they're coding.
Karen from accounting made an entire app even though she's not a "software developer" by trade and people think that's a bad thing?
thingsilearned · 1h ago
Yeah, isn't the main user of those tools non-developers? It's not that developers are getting lazy, it's that people who aren't developers also have technical needs (and some chops).
nyeah · 20m ago
Not all reasonable-sounding developer complaints are legitimate business complaints. For example technical debt is bad, but there are much worse scenarios. For example consider "no customer."
(Not picking on developers in particular. Similar story applies to salespeople, lawyers, technicians, scientists, accountants, or anybody else.)
recursivecaveat · 1h ago
More excels and more improvements to debugging excel please (:
The real super power to excel is you can see the data as it flows through the cells. Whenever I see a visual programming tool that is just a way to write a regular script by linking up a DAG I can't help but feel like they missed the point. Motivated non-programmers have been using COUNTIF, VLOOKUP and such since forever. They're not incapable of writing a textual program 1 statement at a time, it's just that most programming environments don't facilitate it.
afiori · 36m ago
In this spirit excel would be way easier to debug if you could easily show the value of subexpressions in complex formulas
skeledrew · 1h ago
I agree that devs (and everyone else) are fundamentally lazy. I don't agree with the scared. People would rather spend time on things that bring them joy, and that thing which made them excited to work with Company X might be no more, or a whole other thing altogether, 6 months later. But they still need that paycheck, so they do what they can to offset the increasing pain and displeasure so they can continue.
The characterization of visual workflow tools is also an incidental affair: there are commercial tools, and there are open source tools. Just depends on the kind of support one wants, and many devs would love some decent support when some component breaks or something's missing, hence the more likely adoption of a commercial solution.
And in the end it's also just the next evolution of software development tools that's being sought. We moved from flipping switches, to boxes of punch cards, to Assembly, to C-like, to Python-like. We're looking for the next form, and 2-D node-like programming does seem an improvement over 1-D text, as text was an improvement over reams of punched paper. And there will always be those who continue to enjoy doing Assembly, even though the majority moved on to higher level languages, which will also be the case for the current and next level tools.
throwforfeds · 4h ago
In my experience orgs choose these low code tools because good engineers are expensive and many don't fundamentally understand the process of software development.
I've seen business-side product owners complain "why can't you just make it do XYZ this week, Excel can do that" without realizing the application is being built by like three people and if they want the feature roadmap to be on time -- that they themselves planned months ago -- doing something seemingly trivial might be a non-trivial refactor. Trying to keep them focused on the long term is like dealing with a toddler's attention span.
So then they get impatient and the business goes out and buys Salesforce, because it "does everything for cheap", and then they quickly realize if you want to do some non-trivial thing -- which their custom application of course needs to do -- they're shit out of luck or have to buy Marc Benioff a new island.
hobs · 2h ago
Yup, but this time its their choice that one upped the supposed experts, so they cling to buying Marc island for at least 5 years.
daft_pink · 4h ago
I feel the real problem with excel is that it’s not reusable.
Otherwise it’s a decent tool, but the fact that you write your code in a cell that is so tied to other cells with non-useful names that it’s impractical to reuse is a reason why it sucks.
Whereas many of these visual worksflow tools at least can export to json and be manipulated programatically in a useful way.
skydhash · 3h ago
Excel is high level assembly. Immediately executable, worthless on other platforms without reverse engineering.
daft_pink · 2h ago
I don't mean reusing excel formulas on other platforms.
I mean if you write a really long formula in a cell, it's not really practical to use that formula in another workbook that doesn't have the exact same structure.
If you compare that to say a Jupyter notebook which is cell based, you can at least reuse your function in another notebook or cell within any other jupyter notebook rapidly and quickly if you wrote it correctly. Excel not so much.
narcraft · 34m ago
You can have named ranges and cells in Excel, and Excel even has lambda/anonymous functions now. So in latest editions of excel functions can be as general or brittle as they are in any other language or environment, it just depends on how they're written.
sas224dbm · 2h ago
of course it's re-usable .. most passionate excel jockeys would agree, as long it's their VBA that gets reused
junto · 1h ago
In every project I’ve seen where someone has evangelized a visual workflow designer (bar none), the overriding argument has been that “power users”, can “manage” the business workflows.
In every project the business users have no interest in “managing” business workflows, so the developers that built the tool end up having to use the tool for them, implementing their business use cases.
Developers are much more comfortable with code. You cannot easily unit test visual workflow designers. You cannot easily version or put visual workflow designs into source control.
Whenever I see one of these projects I run screaming in the opposite direction.
Locode in general is an anti pattern. I’m specifically looking at Microsoft Dynamics and Power Apps, aka. Microsoft Access Online
I would like to be able to upvote this post 100 times.
ajcp · 3h ago
I believe the writer is comparing local visual workflow programs against local Excel workbooks, that is: personal productivity tools run on a users local machine. This is a very important distinction.
The value prop of these "Low-Code No-Code" platforms has absolutely 0 to do with the actual "user/developer" experience being better/easier/more powerful and everything to do with the orchestration, inheritability, visibility, management, and security capabilities that these platforms provide. If I have 5 artisanal, bespoke Excel workbooks that my "developer" accountant runs locally to complete a part of a critical business process (and they invariably do) then I have 5 ways my business can come to a grinding halt when any number of things happens to that accountant or their computer. I would take 50 less powerful, rickety RPA workflows that I can at least see in a control room over those 5 Excel workbooks any day of the week.
eawgewag · 3h ago
Yes, absolutely.
The reason why my startup uses Zapier isn't because we prefer to use no-code to orchestrate this specific workflow. It's because it's faster than building out all the webhooks, routers, integrations, tables, etc necessary to make this workflow work, stuff that Zapier already natively supports
altairprime · 1h ago
This article is missing something important: businesses are adopting these services in order to lower the required skill level of their headcount roles. If they can outsource the work to a worse product that is barely fit for purposes while reducing the pay and tier of the headcount associated with maintaining it, then that’s a total win so long as flexibility and resilience are lower priority than increasing profits by replacing a high-skilled programmer with a low-skilled worker.
mont_tag · 2h ago
A notable exception is MS Access. It was a huge productivity win. It did not work well with version control but otherwise, it let developers rapidly develop and maintain moderate sized solutions to common business problems. It was also extensible with plain text code when needed.
nyeah · 3h ago
It would be neat if we could divide programming into (a) software development; (b) other labor-saving automation that's less serious.
When a tool crosses from (b) into (a), we'd have to acknowledge that too. (Or ignore it and invite a blizzard of problems, which are now inexplicable because "it was done".)
Every thinking person already in fact does differentiate between (a) and (b) in their own work. So admitting it out loud and just talking about it may not be the apocalypse that many expect. But ymmv.
wiradikusuma · 4h ago
Weird, my fellow developers usually don't advocate visual tools like Zapier, but instead roll their own solution (non-visual). Which, to be honest, comes with its own problems.
42lux · 1h ago
You can brute force via visual workflow tools and it will look impressive to your coworkers because of all the noodles. It's performative like all the shit people did in excel in the 90s.
mont_tag · 2h ago
One place where Visual development tools almost always win is in problem domains that are intrinsically visual (think CAD, form designers, etc)
test6554 · 1h ago
This is a bit like getting mad that Adam Sandler made another movie. It costs you nothing that stuff other people like exists. Don't waste energy on it.
haswell · 3h ago
In a past life, I ran a tools/operations team at a big company for years and later was the product manager for a visual workflow/integration product for a number of years. I've been the IT department trying to manage the crazy things people in the org build, and later worked with hundreds of customers who wanted visual workflow tools for a long list of reasons that have very little to do with what this blog post describes.
I don't think the author understands why these tools exist or why people find them valuable, and there are a number of major issues with their position.
> Excel and visual workflow tools are fundamentally the same: point-and-click interfaces that let people build complex logic without understanding what they’re actually building. Excel uses cells and formulas, visual workflows use boxes and connectors, but the principle is identical. Both promise to make hard things easy.
While I sort of understand the point they're trying to make, I think it's problematic to call these "fundamentally the same" but then compare them on abstract characteristics. By this logic, a car and a bus are fundamentally the same because they both promise to get us from Point A to Point B. This of course misses out on a myriad of reasons cars and busses are quite different in practice.
> Visual workflow tools aren’t succeeding because they’re better, they’re succeeding because we’ve gotten lazy and scared.
These tools are succeeding because:
- They enable teams and individuals to build things they otherwise couldn't without involving central IT or some dev team
- They provide structure and promise to solve a host of operational/management issues associated with keeping an automation running in perpetuity
- They can often be charged to an expense card vs. requiring headcount, existing resource allocation, new budget, etc.
Is the result also a monstrosity? Possibly. But It's a monstrosity that is making something happen that otherwise wouldn't be happening.
And it's possible that the monstrosity will eventually need to be adopted/fixed by a real dev team, but again, that's a team that would never have gotten involved to begin with if someone hadn't built something that now needs to be "fixed". The team doing the fixing sees this as a problem, but the team who built the monstrosity got something built and into production and see it as a win.
It's entirely possible that a "proper" solution built by a dev team would have been superior. But that ultimately doesn't matter if the only way a thing sees the light of day is through the Excel/Visual Workflow Tool pipeline.
These products are not targeted at people who have the ability to build things from scratch the "right" way. And the reasons people/companies buy them usually fall into a few categories: resource constraints, politics, and managers/directors wanting to gain autonomy to build things for their teams without fighting for budget/prioritization with central dev/IT.
moomoo11 · 2h ago
Excel is probably the only software I consider “perfect” and that is saying a lot imo.
> You know what happens with Excel. Karen from accounting builds a “simple” spreadsheet to track expenses. Six months later, it’s a 47-sheet monster with circular references and VLOOKUP formulas that would make a mathematician weep. The company depends on it, nobody understands it...
It sounds like Karen did a valuable service to the company. She combined a technical skill set with her domain knowledge to create a system that was so successful that the company now depends on it. Cleaning up the technical debt seems like a task that's well worth the cost.
> ...And when it breaks (not if, when), guess who gets called to fix it?
I'm not sure, honestly. It depends on whether you want the fix being done by a resource you consider to be a cost center or a value center. The former will do the cleanup job for bottom dollar. The latter would team up with Karen to amplify the project's impact while cleaning it up.
For these reasons I think your analogy is not effective. I don't disagree with your thesis, though; I prefer code in almost all cases. But that's just me. I know for certain, though, that if I had stock options in that company in this hypothetical scenario I'd rather keep Karen around than whoever fixes the VLOOKUP syntax. And if visual tools are what empowers Karen... well, there you go.
So is Photoshop and Google Maps - the point of the article isn't bashing on Excel, it's about choosing the wrong tool for a job.
This is constantly repeated truisms, and yet I don't use it and have no plans using it. I'm certain I'm not alone. Excel is counterintuitive and not 'consumable' as the opposite to SQLite. Surely I understand it not the same. Also I suspect most of the Excel users use it like CVS editor.
The immediate feedback and visual layout make it the definition of "killer app." Jupiter notebooks has been trying to replicate the magic for years. Entire businesses and industries are built around selling products to successfully replicate what was originally living in a spreadsheet somewhere.
Too easy to refute. Treating "Excel" as actually "spreadsheet processing," the software has been so consistently and hugely popular that everything from early PDAs [0] to Google Sheets / iCloud Numbers has supported it. Every type of personal computing device has it, from graphic calculators [1] to laptops to tablets to PDAs to many cell phones.
> I suspect most of the Excel users use it like CVS editor.
Like some classes of addictive chemical compounds, you may start with this but quickly find it is the gateway to other habits.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_95LX
[1] https://education.ti.com/en/software/details/en/139B977E62CB...
I feel like I'm hearing "Hundreds of people who don't like Elvis can't be wrong". And I don't even like Elvis!
"Karen" can literally write programs with little training, there's memory, there's functions, there's references, excel is the best.
I do not particularly like excel, I find it interesting but often obtuse and limited in annoying ways and I agree that for an established workflow using "proper" code is generally better. But imho where Excel excels is in dynamic exploration and supporting decision making, where the type of analysis and visualisations you might want to do can change radically and quickly
And, what's git? A spreadsheet can be committed to git.
Version control for spreadsheets? It'd be awesome to have on its own, but it's also not hard to add it on top of spreadsheets' existing features.
>I'm not sure, honestly. It depends on whether you want the fix being done by a resource you consider to be a cost center or a value center. The former will do the cleanup job for bottom dollar. The latter would team up with Karen to amplify the project's impact while cleaning it up.
You're right that the answer is "it depends." In the world of risk management and audit, what Karen has created is called a "user-developed application." Her employer should give her a big pat on the back, and then take a step back to decide 1) if this Excel spreadsheet is mission critical, 2) if it is, who will maintain it, and 3) whether its importance justifies building a formal IT solution to support the business function (either in-house or using COTS software).
I agree that Karen did nothing wrong! She found a process that could be improved or automated, and was able to use technology to do it. If someone is caught off guard when the Excel file goes kaput, then that's not Karen's problem nor is it her fault; it's her employer's responsibility to pay attention to their own business requirements.
The technical debt here was solved by creating a complex Excel worksheet. The sheet is the solution.
For small companies where these Excel monsters get created, it is the #1 best way (read - cheapest) to solve technical debt, which, before Excel, was probably a bunch of arcane manual processes that took 5x as long with worse accuracy.
This is not the first time I see developers berating non-technical users, and I like the thesis that they will function as cost-centers that will do a cleanup job instead of teaming up with the user. It's like they will attempt to "do the work" in a binary fashion, making the "correct" choices, often focused on technical factors, like which library to use or what algorithm, instead of focusing on the business domain.
I also see this attitude when facing technical issues or bad code as if it wasn't our job to deal with bad code (and as if non-bad code existed)
That said, there are a few points against this as a complaint. First, is the incredibly important point that many many tools are people rediscovering pivot tables. There was a fun rant a while back about "your startup is just a pivot table." Hilarious read.
After that, visual workflows are clearly easier for people to understand. Just look at the directions you get with any "self assembled" furniture. Some of that, I'm sure, is to avoid having to translate a lot? Hard not to argue that it is still probably the more effective way to communicate things.
My final caveat is that the symbolic nature of program code is one that is largely lost on people. Specifically, people seem to think the software is independent of the execution environment that is necessary to understand in the language they are using.
I'd love to read this, but can't seem to find it. Any idea where I could find it at?
Karen from accounting made an entire app even though she's not a "software developer" by trade and people think that's a bad thing?
(Not picking on developers in particular. Similar story applies to salespeople, lawyers, technicians, scientists, accountants, or anybody else.)
The real super power to excel is you can see the data as it flows through the cells. Whenever I see a visual programming tool that is just a way to write a regular script by linking up a DAG I can't help but feel like they missed the point. Motivated non-programmers have been using COUNTIF, VLOOKUP and such since forever. They're not incapable of writing a textual program 1 statement at a time, it's just that most programming environments don't facilitate it.
The characterization of visual workflow tools is also an incidental affair: there are commercial tools, and there are open source tools. Just depends on the kind of support one wants, and many devs would love some decent support when some component breaks or something's missing, hence the more likely adoption of a commercial solution.
And in the end it's also just the next evolution of software development tools that's being sought. We moved from flipping switches, to boxes of punch cards, to Assembly, to C-like, to Python-like. We're looking for the next form, and 2-D node-like programming does seem an improvement over 1-D text, as text was an improvement over reams of punched paper. And there will always be those who continue to enjoy doing Assembly, even though the majority moved on to higher level languages, which will also be the case for the current and next level tools.
I've seen business-side product owners complain "why can't you just make it do XYZ this week, Excel can do that" without realizing the application is being built by like three people and if they want the feature roadmap to be on time -- that they themselves planned months ago -- doing something seemingly trivial might be a non-trivial refactor. Trying to keep them focused on the long term is like dealing with a toddler's attention span.
So then they get impatient and the business goes out and buys Salesforce, because it "does everything for cheap", and then they quickly realize if you want to do some non-trivial thing -- which their custom application of course needs to do -- they're shit out of luck or have to buy Marc Benioff a new island.
Otherwise it’s a decent tool, but the fact that you write your code in a cell that is so tied to other cells with non-useful names that it’s impractical to reuse is a reason why it sucks.
Whereas many of these visual worksflow tools at least can export to json and be manipulated programatically in a useful way.
I mean if you write a really long formula in a cell, it's not really practical to use that formula in another workbook that doesn't have the exact same structure.
If you compare that to say a Jupyter notebook which is cell based, you can at least reuse your function in another notebook or cell within any other jupyter notebook rapidly and quickly if you wrote it correctly. Excel not so much.
In every project the business users have no interest in “managing” business workflows, so the developers that built the tool end up having to use the tool for them, implementing their business use cases.
Developers are much more comfortable with code. You cannot easily unit test visual workflow designers. You cannot easily version or put visual workflow designs into source control.
Whenever I see one of these projects I run screaming in the opposite direction.
Locode in general is an anti pattern. I’m specifically looking at Microsoft Dynamics and Power Apps, aka. Microsoft Access Online
I would like to be able to upvote this post 100 times.
The value prop of these "Low-Code No-Code" platforms has absolutely 0 to do with the actual "user/developer" experience being better/easier/more powerful and everything to do with the orchestration, inheritability, visibility, management, and security capabilities that these platforms provide. If I have 5 artisanal, bespoke Excel workbooks that my "developer" accountant runs locally to complete a part of a critical business process (and they invariably do) then I have 5 ways my business can come to a grinding halt when any number of things happens to that accountant or their computer. I would take 50 less powerful, rickety RPA workflows that I can at least see in a control room over those 5 Excel workbooks any day of the week.
The reason why my startup uses Zapier isn't because we prefer to use no-code to orchestrate this specific workflow. It's because it's faster than building out all the webhooks, routers, integrations, tables, etc necessary to make this workflow work, stuff that Zapier already natively supports
When a tool crosses from (b) into (a), we'd have to acknowledge that too. (Or ignore it and invite a blizzard of problems, which are now inexplicable because "it was done".)
Every thinking person already in fact does differentiate between (a) and (b) in their own work. So admitting it out loud and just talking about it may not be the apocalypse that many expect. But ymmv.
I don't think the author understands why these tools exist or why people find them valuable, and there are a number of major issues with their position.
> Excel and visual workflow tools are fundamentally the same: point-and-click interfaces that let people build complex logic without understanding what they’re actually building. Excel uses cells and formulas, visual workflows use boxes and connectors, but the principle is identical. Both promise to make hard things easy.
While I sort of understand the point they're trying to make, I think it's problematic to call these "fundamentally the same" but then compare them on abstract characteristics. By this logic, a car and a bus are fundamentally the same because they both promise to get us from Point A to Point B. This of course misses out on a myriad of reasons cars and busses are quite different in practice.
> Visual workflow tools aren’t succeeding because they’re better, they’re succeeding because we’ve gotten lazy and scared.
These tools are succeeding because:
- They enable teams and individuals to build things they otherwise couldn't without involving central IT or some dev team
- They provide structure and promise to solve a host of operational/management issues associated with keeping an automation running in perpetuity
- They can often be charged to an expense card vs. requiring headcount, existing resource allocation, new budget, etc.
Is the result also a monstrosity? Possibly. But It's a monstrosity that is making something happen that otherwise wouldn't be happening.
And it's possible that the monstrosity will eventually need to be adopted/fixed by a real dev team, but again, that's a team that would never have gotten involved to begin with if someone hadn't built something that now needs to be "fixed". The team doing the fixing sees this as a problem, but the team who built the monstrosity got something built and into production and see it as a win.
It's entirely possible that a "proper" solution built by a dev team would have been superior. But that ultimately doesn't matter if the only way a thing sees the light of day is through the Excel/Visual Workflow Tool pipeline.
These products are not targeted at people who have the ability to build things from scratch the "right" way. And the reasons people/companies buy them usually fall into a few categories: resource constraints, politics, and managers/directors wanting to gain autonomy to build things for their teams without fighting for budget/prioritization with central dev/IT.