“Workflow” is probably a bit generous to describe how they probably use Excel.
Having worked at a mom and pop ISP a couple of decades ago where we used Excel to track a lot of things, I can see how this might have happened.
To actually know who is allocated what is ultimately just a list.
And when there are only a few people who edit the list (and probably no more than 1 person at a time) you can get by with even a plain text file, but Excel is quite a bit nicer as you can do things like filtering and sorting easily, maybe even some formulas to help with things.
Building a program backed by a database might be nice, but hard to justify when the manual system has never been a problem before.
They’ve probably been thinking for a while they should, but it’s just never been enough of a pain point for them to invest the effort.
Looks like they see this incident as justification that they need a system with hard coded rules and constraints, no more manual checking.
alt Hacker News
“Workflow” is probably a bit generous to describe how they probably use Excel.
Having worked at a mom and pop ISP a couple of decades ago where we used Excel to track a lot of things, I can see how this might have happened.
To actually know who is allocated what is ultimately just a list.
And when there are only a few people who edit the list (and probably no more than 1 person at a time) you can get by with even a plain text file, but Excel is quite a bit nicer as you can do things like filtering and sorting easily, maybe even some formulas to help with things.
Building a program backed by a database might be nice, but hard to justify when the manual system has never been a problem before.
They’ve probably been thinking for a while they should, but it’s just never been enough of a pain point for them to invest the effort.
Looks like they see this incident as justification that they need a system with hard coded rules and constraints, no more manual checking.