I'm shocked not only because I'm familiar with this very real problem from a user perspective, but mostly because it's a problem space I've actually worked on before and achieved some modicum of success/career advancement from it at one of the bulge bracket investment banks (which I won't name here for confidentiality reasons).
I'm not here to boast, I just want to know what the HN community thinks about this problem and who would be seriously interested to work on this problem with me.
I know there's been some HN discussion on this before. I've had a read through them and I've looked at some of the forays into this space (couldn't check out DabbleDB since they're shutting down). I don't think any of them hit the sweet spot as described.
I read this list about 2 years ago whilst I was still at the bank and thought: "Ah it's on there! Someone will work it out, not me, I'm not a great hacker. My approach is too simple and my success is an isolated case with no value outside of corporate laddering". But seeing the current progression in this space is a bit of a major wake up call for me.
What I hacked up whilst at the bank, I did on my own spare time without IT budget and with no exceptional/atypical office software. Naturally this made me (technically) dismissive of what I had hacked up but for the senior managers and COOs, this was something else. One senior MD said to me: "it's like magic, where did you learn to do this?". I answered: "Google".
After seeing #22 blank, I'm not surprised to see #5 also blank. A lot of it's to do with legacy and characteristics of their technology adoption demographic. Their PeopleSoft system is s, their financial control system is s, their in-house CRM is s* (this can go on for a while). So what employees and managers end up doing is using lots of badly maintained spreadsheets, poorly coded or no VBA macros or if you're really lucky, IT will get a morsel of budget and release an arcane and really useless tool that top-top level managers will make mandatory because no one has taken the time to properly understand the real problem. This will feedback into the problem, making the spreadsheets and processes even more complicated and even more useless than before. Repeat until it gets so bad that in desperation you pay to make it go away with Wipro or Infosys etc. but that just opens up a whole new kind of problem.
But for some people, they actually like this! (I kid you not!) To them it means "job security", no wonder the cost/revenue ratio is +80%! For myself, I'm not really driven by money and more importantly I'm lazy in a sense that I want to apply my mind to work on more interesting problems; I don't want to be manually crunching data just because the spreadsheet model I've inherited becomes so convoluted that my manager becomes paranoid. That's a dumb. So I went about reducing my work.
I didn't find the right approach or solution miraculously or overnight. It took many months of my own time and effort. But what was pivotal wasn't the amount of time I spent coding, it was the time spent speaking to and getting feedback from various business managers, financial controllers, HR business partners, senior managers, COOs, sales MDs etc. They wanted something so robust yet so simple and familiar, they didn't even know they were using it (a bit less so for Front Office as long as it means getting paid i.e. top level mandate).
After I had developed a fairly bespoke solution for their Middle Office Operations and HR in APAC, they started talking about bringing it to the global level and IT managers approached (yes bank IT...) and they wanted to adopt it for their own needs (I fob them off for office political reasons). I ended up getting poached by the COO for Asia Equities on the business side to adapt it to cross securities sales management globally and MIS (to go to the CEO of IB) as a interim to a proper cross-securities CRM (which is still to this day not yet ready).
They then handed me the lead business analyst role to oversee the major overhaul and rollout of major trading risk system to fix again the same seemingly simple problem. But now it was no longer about building something great, it was now actually about pretty (but empty) "project management" powerpoints, office politics and making your PHB look great. In case you haven't worked it out by now, I quit after bonus.
I wouldn't call what I hacked up at the bank a full product or answer to #22, but it's the foundation of something that can possibly fill the vacuum in this space. I know I can't do it by myself. I may have some technical experience, good ties and networks with senior managers but I need someone else with the even harder technical skills, perspective and audacity to make it happen. Problem #22 needs a great hacker!
Unfortunately I don't know many great hackers, I grew up in a bit of a backwater city and I went to law school for some weird (Asian parents) reason. I don't want to share too much more yet, would like to hear back from some great hackers first!
If naught, that's alright, I've planned to/been accepted into a research focused CS program at Australian National University. Just thought I give it a thought one more time.
