this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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I did advanced mathematics and chose physics as one of my elective subjects in school. Nowadays, I do a lot of work based around analytics and forecasting.
"We need to find the average of this."
"That's easy. I'll do some more advanced stuff to really dial in the accuracy."
"Awesome. What's the timeframe?"
looks at million row dataset "To find the average? Like a month. Some of these numbers are mispelled words... Why are all these blank?"
"Oh, you'll have to read this 45 page document that outlines the default values."
And that's how roffice maths works. Lots and lots of if conditions, query merges, and meetings with other teams trying to understand why they entered in the thing they entered. By the time the data wrangling phase is complete, you give zero fucks about doing more than supplying the average.
That's software development for you. Why is that weird value there? Because some guy, at some point, had checked for that and somehow it's still relevant.
I know of a system that churns through literally millions of transactions representing millions of Euros every day, and their interface has load bearing typos (because Germans in the 90s were really bad at the Englishs).