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Ask HN: Does anything beat the uptime of emails and Excel?

7 points by yodelshady ↗ HN
Once again, I have in the recent past found myself using emails + Excel to exchange sensitive, time-critical data. Yes, we have a "proper" platform and for some undefined security reason I've lost access - I believe I now exist on a separate astral plane to all other employees, which is reassuring but makes account recovery difficult. I might regain it this week, but we needed to process the data yesterday. I suppose you could argue it's good training for business continuity in a partial DoS.

On a related note, my partner has managed (as the customer) migrating an examination platform recently, to a "more secure" one with lots of yummy microservices. Or was - the contract has now been cancelled and she's looking for a new job, and possibly therapy, after a torrent of personal abuse caused by bugs she simply cannot fix.

What's sad is that I wish I could say this was unusual. But it's anywhere and everywhere I've worked.

Quite seriously, what are we doing? Why do other apps exist when I will, every single time, be justified in replicating the entire workflow in emails + Excel? I'm at least partially supposed to advise on security, and the only people who won't recite this very rant at me as a reason to ignore all security advice, are the people who can't be bothered to.

The one ray of light is that at least it's easy enough to attach links to access-controlled spreadsheets now, rather the spreadsheets themselves, possibly protected with a password (usually, in that same email).

I thank you for listening to this /rant.

12 comments

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tsjq
Ans to the qn in title : carrier-class network eqpt .
quickthrower2
Trade off security vs convenience. And with higher security comes the risk of higher incorrect security locking you out.
giantg2
Interesting. I haven't seen these sorts of problems in my company. At least nothing that couldn't be fixed quickly for data sharing. We even deal with passing data externally. Usually the setup is something like a dedicated FTP server that is configured to allow SFTP for whitelisted IPs, credentials for the file creators/consumers which only give them limited access to a single folder. I think there's a couple other steps in there. Also, this is B2B, and wouldn't be a good B2C model.
consilience
Email + Excel just isn’t efficient if you’ve outgrown a flat-file system and most paper-based processes. That being said, I get your frustration 100%.

The solution: build or befriend a relational database developer that will create a bespoke solution of your dreams. The more difficult part is getting c-level buy in and wading through whatever crap middle management believes to be the flavor of the month.

dgeiser13
What happens when the developer leaves and the app breaks?
codegladiator
Paper trail beats uptime of emails/excel. More secure than anything on the internet.
blakeburch
What sort of workflows are you creating that end up being better served with emails + Excel?

Most of the time, I see _more_ issues when teams over rely on Excel files. Data inconsistencies abound, audit trails are nearly impossible, and security access is difficult to manage. The end goal for most processes is to limit the amount of human touch-points... not increase it.

decafninja
Working at a bank, I know there are at least a few traders who would love to exterminate most/all in-house developed systems, fire most of the tech employees save for a minimal skeleton support crew, and go back to using good ol' trusty Excel.
zhte415
Traders however tend to have:

A - A pretty numerical mindset. Sit in front of their computers all day. Know their processes inside-out.

B - Perhaps not formally trained, but working with data, Bloomberg extracts, a self-taught sense in normalising data.

C - If there's an Excel function that saves time, they know it. This also leads to trader-as-a-developer with personal VBA scripts as that's good enough and there's an IDE in Excel that doesn't need layers of approval to use (which is obviously a disaster) - this also means thinking "If I can do this in Excel in a day, why does it need a development team of 5 to do in a month?"

D - Fast turn-around. That means keeping on top of messages, dates, calendar. And a sense of prioritising this without needing a system to do it. And messages pumped through mail, phone, BBM, conversations all tied together.

E - Don't want to be Nick Leeson and have a grudging acceptance that compliance and audit is a thing.

F - Except when they don't.

Contrast that to typical clerical roles where these things are somewhat 'slower paced' and doing things with Excel/following-up emails becomes a disaster - not in all cases, but in many.

All BAs I know in banking/finance are exceptional communicators that get through points A-F above.

osullivj
In my experience D: Fast turn-around also applies to software dev. Traders get frustrated waiting for IT to deliver new features and systems, so hack up a solution in the closest available tool - Excel.
osullivj
And the converse. IT depts at banks want to exterminate Excel solutions as they're perceived as unsupportable. But on trading floors traders are the boss, so Excel will never be decommed.
decafninja
Yup, this too. Although another factor that supports decommissioning Excel based hacky solutions is regulatory stuff.