[Tarks]

Shhhhhhhh.

Do you have any idea how much I made in Fintech converting spreadsheets that'd exceeded the TA's ability to hack/keep it all in their head and/or quit?

Favourite included a single cell that had, I am not kidding, something like 150+ nested if statements.. and there was a dateTime bug in it somewhere :D

A friend did very well positioning himself as a data engineering consultant that could come in and quickly improve poorly thrown together data pipelines, wonder what the equivalent is for these :)

[amichal]

Wasn't fintech but was fin something. Several weeks into trying to port a Excel workbook with a zillion tabs, some VBscript from stackoverflow and other nastiness and being unable to replicate the results. I discovered the "consultant" who help them create this insane thing had turned on the "allow circular references"[1] option and choosen a number of iterations that "Seemed to make it work"

Yay! for non-deterministic financial modeling.

Also was really fun trying to explain to the folks who hired me why I couldnt get the results they wanted to see.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/remove-or-allow-a...

[Tarks]

ha wow, read about a guy having to clean up after some data scientists that'd figured out how to use circular references and an iteration limit to do crazy, hard to replicate stuff, (thankfully) never ran into it myself but I bet that was a 'fun' time for you !

Here's to hoping we both never have to dip back into that world again :D