Last panel is wrong. Genie would just grant him an MBA from a top tier school
I once looked through a textbook from my friend’s MBA course. The first thing I noticed was in a highlighted box in the chapter on business negotiating: “Your skill at negotiating will affect the outcome of the negotiations.”
These are the people that make 10X what I make.
This is why I refuse to get an MBA. I already know my pants go on my legs. Thanks.
In Czech we say MBA means Mladý, Blbý, Arogantní - Young, Dumb, Arrogant.
You’ve probably had the experience of sharing the highways there with Germans cutting through your country to get to Austria and forgetting they were not on the Autobahn any more. I drove a rental car when I visited there years ago, and I’ve never had a more terrifying driving experience than looking in my rearview mirror and seeing empty road stretching back for miles, and two seconds later having a black BMW riding my ass and flashing its high beams at me.
I learned this in my first statics class, and I have a BS in business administration.
Japanese companies, this isn’t a wish, it’s a fundamental truth of the universe. Like gravity. No matter the scale or importance of them. I promise you your car exists because of an Excel 2003 file on some underpaid engineer’s laptop that they periodically sync with an inventory system.
I once worked for a Japanese company where I had to make a presentation. In Excel, I shit you not. Then we had one of our “shadow” managers make a Japanese translation of the same thing. It took me two days to get the kerning and print layout right, especially with that weird english typeface that is Japanese standard, I hate to think how long the translator took to get their version right.
Microsoft spent years and years trying to get people to not use Excel as a database, until they eventually had to give up hope that anyone who doesn’t know the difference would voluntarily use Access, so they started adding database-like functionality to Excel to meet their customer’s demands and try to make the experience at least a little bit less painful.
This is a real-life case of “meet the user where they are” despite the designer’s wishes, because even within Microsoft, there is strong agreement on not using Excel as a DB.
I only ever encountered Access was once many years ago and I was warned that it had issues with multiple users.
Well, to be fair to Access, it’s not like Excel is such a great multi-user database either, now is it? ;-)
Well excel nowadays doesn’t have issues with concurrent users if you have office 365 like many companies do.
At that time it was Access with the files located at a company shared drive, the issue was concurrent writes I believe.
i…isn’t that the entire point of excel? what is it for if not to store data?
similarly i remember a reddit comment that broke my brain, saying no one should be using excel, they should be using a ‘cell matrix organizer’ or similar. we all can name 5 off the top of our heads
Excel has a purpose, but storing data long term isn’t it. It’s for calculating data. It shouldn’t be the single source of truth.
One of the things Microsoft did to make it work was extending the row limit from 65k to 1M. Apparently, Economics professors were very excited about that one, which explains a lot.
Storing data is only one of the parts to the formula of what makes a database. Proper databases require structured storage of the data and some way to query the data constructively. Excel did not have those features until Microsoft gave up trying to convince people to not use it as a DB and added it to Excel.
This is basically what I run for a living and it’s definitely not glamorous.
Employers get what they demand, what they deserve. Anyway excel works as a database until around 1 million entries…
I feel you. Working in healthcare, ms office is the only thing consistently installed site wide I can take advantage of to run a db.
Couldn’t you use Access instead of Excel or is that not possible for your use case?
Unfortunately IT blocked Access installs because some staff were using it for mission critical processes, and upon leaving IT were required to maintain them. They felt excel was less likely to lead to scenarios like this.
Little did they know excel projects are probably worse to maintain.
I work as a network tech for a globally spanning ISP specializing in fiber services, handling major maintenances that are service effecting for business and government customers (SLAs are in effect). These maintenances are planned and tracked through various excel sheets - housed either in a shared network drive (so yeah, we may run into issues where multiple people are trying to edit the same doc at once), or excel tables in a SharePoint.
Prior to the merger of companies I recently went through, we had actual database systems to track this stuff that worked just fine. And now we’re relying on the same shit a grad student would use to track their doctorate progress. It’ll work until it doesn’t. Looking forward to the shit-show if it gets me overtime.
Anyone else use Microsoft Access…30 years ago?
Fun fact: most of the electronic voting machines in the 2000 presidential election used Access to store vote counts. Access, the “database” with a user-editable audit table.
