Introduction Recently, I watched a video by YouTuber ThePrimeTime which details a dev’s frustrations with business culture. Prime is an ex-entrepreneur who currently works in software development at Netflix. His views in this video have been criticised for being jaded by FAANG business cultures he has worked in. I personally don’t feel this way. Although there is some truth to the developer’s (mataroa’s) article, I think it misses the root causes of many issues raised. I have mixed feelings about the article in question. Some areas I agreed with and others I disagreed with. However I did want to address one particular concern / statement: I work on a platform that cost my organization an eye-watering sum of money to produce, over the span of two years, and the engineers responsible for it elected to use spreadsheets to control the infrastructure, so we now have a spreadsheet with 400 separate worksheets that powers but one part of this whole shambling mess. I’m speculating here, but I’d imagine that the business/SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) are using VBA to some capacity to control their 400 worksheet collection. So this begs the question… Why do people use VBA? In order to answer this question, we must first look at another question - who actually uses VBA in the first place? In 2021 I ran a poll on /r/vba where I asked redditors why they code in VBA. From these data, we can clearly see that the majority of people who use VBA do so mainly because they have no other choice. Many organisations run their entire business processes with Excel, and when a little bit of automation is required VBA is usually #1 on the list. The versatility of VBA In the business I currently work for, in the engineering division, we have access to a variety of technologies (automation platforms): OnPrem - PowerShell (No access to Install-Module) OnPrem - Excel (VBA / OfficeJS (limited access) / OfficeScripts / PowerQuery) OnPrem - PowerBI Desktop OnPrem - SAP Analysis for Office OnCloud - Power Platform (PowerApps, Power BI, PowerAutomate (non-premium only)) SandboxedServer - ArcGIS (ArcPy) SandboxedServer - MapInfo (MapBasic) SandboxedServer - InfoWorks ICM (Ruby) SandboxedCloud - ArcGIS Online We also have a number of databases controlled by IT: D1. OnPrem - Geospatial database D2. OnCloud - Geospatial mirror D3. OnPrem - SAP database D4. OnCloud - SAP BW4HANA partial mirror D5. OnPrem - Telemetry platform D6. OnPrem - Sharepoint D7. OnCloud - Sharepoint Online D8. OnCloud - EDM Telemetry platform D9. OnCloud - Large mirror database D10. OnPrem - LotusNotes database D11. OnPrem - IBM BPM database D12. OnPrem - File System D13. OnPrem - Hydraulic Model Information D1-D13 databases are summarised in the table below listing what types of data are stored in which systems, the importance of the data stored in each database, and whether the database is essentially a replica of OnPrem information: Data Type D1 D2 D3 D4 D5 D6 D7 D8 D9 D10 D11 D12 D13 Customer Issues X X X X X Asset Data X X X X X X X X X Telemetry Data X X Risk Data X X X X X X Financial Data X X X Misc Data X X X X X X Note: D6 would be C tier if it weren’t for the fact we continue to store a business critical spreadsheet on Sharepoint OnPrem for compatibility reasons. See the control of VBA for details. And the data’s importance / on cloud replication: Data Type D1 D2 D3 D4 D5 D6 D7 D8 D9 D10 D11 D12 D13 Data Importance S S S S S S/C A B S S S S A Replica of N/A D1 N/A ~D3 N/A N/A N/A N/A ~D4 N/A N/A N/A N/A Note: Online replicas are de facto replicas in terms of data’s importance, although the reason we need to connect to them is diminished Finally, let’s examine how our Automation Platforms link to our Data Platforms. Links shown in the diagram are where the automation platform can access the data from the various data platforms/sources: Note: Some of the links from VBA to OnCloud services are based on my attempts alone. There is no doubt in my mind that VBA can interface with SAP BW4HANA and our other cloud services, I just haven’t figured out the authentication requirements and protocols yet Here’s where you might start to see an issue. Looks like the only automation platforms which can connect to all the data sources we need is VBA and Powershell. Power BI Desktop has been introduced in our business but doesn’t hit all the platforms which VBA does, and even if it did Power BI cannot be used for process automation where-as VBA can, so what’s the point making the switch? Users who do use Power BI to target these other datasets usually generate CSVs of this other data and store these in cloud sharepoint system, but what generates those CSVs? VBA. Now, we’d love to use a higher level language in our organisation to handle this business automation. However, every request for a high level language to be installed across the team/business e.g. Python / Ruby / Node / Rust etc. has been rejected by CyberSecurity in favour of technologies like PowerAutomate, PowerApps which as you can see above barely touch any of the data we need. It is supposedly “Against the technology strategic vision of the company” to allow “end-users” access to high level programming languages. Now even if the data access was there in our business, PowerPlatform would still be insufficient to perform the majority of our processes because the algorithms required are so complex that a PowerAutomate solutions would become infuriating to maintain and incomprehensible to even IT folks (e.g. See projection algorithms). Ultimately the stand-out technologies for us are Powershell v3 (doesn’t even support class syntax and cannot install modules), and VBA, purely from a versatility standpoint. As a result of this ‘monopoly’ on technology I and others have spent hundreds of hours building open source VBA libraries which augment VBA promoting it to a reasonable language by modern standards. The maintenance guarantee of VBA D10 and D11 above are intimately linked. In 2000s many of our systems were built on top of IBM Lotus Notes databases. In 2019 Lotus Notes was acquired by HCL, and since then longevity of support has been wavering. Support will officially die in June 2024. As a result, since 2019, technology teams have been trying to migrate many of our systems to new technologies. The business spent an eye watering amount of money developing a system using IBM Business Process manager to supercede one of these Lotus Notes databases. The anticipation was that D11 would be backfilled with all the data from D10, once fully built, and D10 would be archived. It’s now 2023: We are 8 months away from official support dying. Technology teams have thrown away their support contact for IBM BPM. There is no replacement in sight for both IBM BPM and Lotus Notes databases. IBM BPM solution is poorly maintained IBM BPM solution has numerous issues and doesn’t function as needed Solution has been shoehorned into IBM BPM, despite the platform not being fit for purpose i.e. while IBM BPM does come with a REST API, this REST API is borderline useless to Technology teams and SMEs Some REST calls use javascript encoded as strings Others require html embedded in json embedded in xml Database tables aren’t queried by name but by GUID. There’s no documentation of which GUID relates to which table/process. The data from D10 was never actually transferred to D11, meaning the business is now using 2 systems instead of 1. D11 data model doesn’t really support the data in D10 either. Technology teams appear to be ignoring waning support contracts. This could be due to lack of resources, finances and/or priority. SME’s use these tools on a daily basis, and ultimately it is SME’s who determine changes that need to be made to the system. If SMEs use VBA, they can control and maintain the system as needed. They have a maintenance guarantee, something that should be said for IT systems too, but can’t be. The control of VBA In a recent project we are building a new all enc