There are better ways to do that even in Excel!
Comment on OceanGate’s ill-fated Titan sub relied on a hand-typed Excel spreadsheet
TommySoda@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Jesus Christ that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. The submarine in the game Iron Lung was safer to drive than this thing. Manual positional updates onto a spreadsheet and then literally drawn by hand on a map? I wouldn’t even trust this thing in a damn swimming pool.
Madrigal@lemmy.world 5 days ago
doctortran@lemm.ee 4 days ago
Right? I work with plenty of users in non-technical roles who have at best rudimentary Excel skills, and even they could figure out a better way to manage this. The whole thing with Excel is to make basic data work accessible even to a rube, and let them do an incredible amount of things otherwise outside their skillet.
Using Excel like this is like giving someone a pressure cooker and they only use it to boil water.
leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 4 days ago
What’s worse is that half the coordinates probably ended up as dates…
invno1@lemmy.one 4 days ago
Or comma separated values…F, that,
CptEnder@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Man if it wasn’t for that kid that was probably dragged into this, I’d be fucking rolling rn. How fucking stupid do you have to be to not see the sea of red flags???
Korkki@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I really do wonder why they ended up in this. It can’ be that hard to make even a hacky DIY system to do it automatically. The navigation system just had to have some digital or even analog output, then it would be just the problem of interpreting the signal with some script and writing it into a file.
superkret@feddit.org 5 days ago
To write a script, you need someone who can write scripts.
If all you have is someone who can write VLOOKUPs in Excel, and the CEO is too cheap to hire someone, then that’s what you use.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 5 days ago
So basically it’s a project done by MBA geniuses, entrepreneurs and visionaries who optimized by cutting on those mundane and boring nautical engineers and software developers?
God, do I like how evolution works.
0x0@programming.dev 5 days ago
Image
DogEatWaffle@startrek.website 5 days ago
I think you’re overestimating the competence on display here…
lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
Sounds like they did the lookups by hand actually
0x0@programming.dev 5 days ago
All-manager team, no devs?
elvith@feddit.org 5 days ago
That’s why they use, what they know: Excel. I wonder if the UI was done in PowerPoint?
0x0@programming.dev 5 days ago
Nah, FrontPage.
peopleproblems@lemmy.world 5 days ago
It’s exactly like Fallout lol
T156@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I like how the company didn’t consider using standard software to do it, and then switch to the in-house system that they made later, instead of just having it done by hand instead.