I'd like to take a moment to praise Brenda.
That's not her real name, though it might be. I've met at least
three of her over the years.
Brenda is not a programmer. Some big strong man told her that when she
was the office junior, and she believed it.
Brenda has casually invented modular coding, functional programming,
debug tracing, big O notation. While writing macros in Excel. She's
done more with the spreadsheet shackles on than her "programmer"
colleagues have dreamed of.
Nobody ever told her that mere spreadsheet work could be hard, not
like programming, so she thinks anyone can do it and she must be
very stupid for taking so long. So she has never written any
documentation. The younger admin types have checklists for using her
spreadsheets, that they follow as precisely as a demon-summoning
wizard with someone else's incantation.
Some time soon Brenda will retire. Within six months, the company will
explode. And nobody will know why.
- Posted by Chris at
01:53pm on
06 April 2026
This strikes chords all over the place. In the academic world of my youth, Brenda was the faculty secretary who quietly knew everything about any given department, and if she was off sick (which happened about once every ten years) the whole place ceased to function properly because nobody else knew everyone's jobs the way she did.
She didn't know she did anything difficult either. Just a secretary, remember? That's a tiny bit above "typist".
Oh, and she remembered the birthdays of the professor's wife and children. Not because it was part of her job, but because somebody had to and the professor was absent-minded.
I met Brenda again, in a different university fifty years later. Mercifully, she didn't retire while I was a student there, but I gather that when she did leave, a little while after I had got my degree and gone, the department exploded.
- Posted by John Dallman at
03:55pm on
06 April 2026
Some large companies are aware of this problem, in general terms. Their solution is to build all the necessary calculations into their hugely expensive Software-as-a-Service purchase. That sort of prevents it, but efficiency suffers.
Do not let your spreadsheets be maintained by someone who is diligent, but stupid. Their complexity grows exponentially.
- Posted by John P at
11:16pm on
06 April 2026
Or Eric's report. The one that the company paid a few £K to be developed in their new ERP system last year. Eric retired 7 years ago, but every Monday the report he came up with is produced & circulated ... to an audience that never looks at it. They just assume that it is important to someone else.
Or Doris in accounts, who spends 4 days preparing the end of month reporting by exporting data to a stack of spreadsheets. Just like she has always done. She says she hasn't got time to learn to use the new reports in the ERP system that will produce the same results in a few minutes.
- Posted by RogerBW at
09:12am on
07 April 2026
John D - and then they need to change SaaS vendor and all the details get lost, because nobody in the company remembers, the departing vendor has nothing to gain, and the arriving vendor isn't going to seek out more stuff to do, it should have been in the contract.
John P - the Brendas I've known have built spreadsheets that work better than the new ERP system, and keep working when there's a fire in a machine room in Ireland, which mysteriously seems to happen every end of month when the oversold cloud service can't cope.
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