> But that’s not what Brenda was hired for.

Are you suggesting that Brenda should stay in her box?

No, I’m suggesting that she is ineffective exactly because she stays in her box.

She should replaced with someone who says, “this box doesn’t need to be here… there is a better way of doing things.”

NOT to be confused with the junior engineer who comes into a project and says it’s garbage and suggests we rewrite it from scratch in ${hotLanguage} because they saw it on a blog somewhere.

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jimbokun 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> She should replaced with someone who says, “this box doesn’t need to be here… there is a better way of doing things.”

The article is about this kind of Brenda.

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daveguy 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It may not be what you meant to say, but it's exactly what you are saying where ${hotLanguage} is the latest automation platform or AI gimmick.

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Esophagus4 19 hours ago | parent [-]

I’m not sure why you’re going down to the mat for hanging onto redundant people putting numbers in spreadsheets.

At large companies in particular, there are far too many people who simply turn their widgets - this was the entire point of the tech revolution.

Think about how many bookkeepers were needed before Excel. Someone could have made your exact same argument (but it’s just the latest gimmick!) about Excel 30 years ago. And yet, technology will make businesses more efficient whether people stand in its way or not.

Even at a small company of one or two, QuickBooks will reduce the amount of bookkeepers and accountants needed. TurboTax will further reduce that.

We will need fewer people in the future maintaining their Excel spreadsheets, and more people building the automation for those processes.

The change averse will always find reasons not to adapt - they will create their own obsolescence.

(inb4 but it’s way more expensive to pay developers to automate!)

	▲	daveguy 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not going to the mat for anyone. I'm just saying AI use in spreadsheets is a terrible idea because AI just isn't that good. Currently I'd put it worse than tearing things up for ${hotLanguage} because at least ${hotLanguage} is deterministic and debuggable. Honestly, I'm not sure why you're going to the mat for AI in spreadsheets, or why you think it's a good use case, or why you seem to think "automation" doesn't come with overhead of its own. Current iterations of AI are recommendation engines. Even then you better have version control.