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This happened to a friend of mine. He had no programming experience but was tech savvy.

The organisation was using an excel spreadsheet for a bunch of things. The org identied his tech savvy-ness and asked him to add some functionality.

He taught himself VB for this task. I still remember the message he sent me happy he'd discovered functions. I asked him how many lines he had written, he was 3000 lines deep by the time he discovered functions.

He knew this was bad. He kept telling management this was too complex for an excel spreadsheet that is emailed around, and they should hire a developer to build proper solution.

He later left the org for greener pastures and on more than one occasion they contacted him to asking to add additional functionality to the spreadsheet. Each time he'd tell them they should hire a developer to write a real application, with a real database and they weren't interested. So he'd quote some stupid hourly rate hoping they'd go away and each time they agreed to it.

Last I heard, his spaghetti spreadsheet still lives on 10 years later.



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