Comment by moron4hire

9 hours ago

I consider CSV to be a signal of an unserious organization. The kind of place that uses thousand line Excel files with VBA macros instead of just buying a real CRM already. The kind of place that thinks junior developers are cheaper than senior developers. The kind of place where the managers brow beat you into working overtime by arguing from a single personal perspective that "this is just how business is done, son."

People will blithely parrot, "it's a poor Workman who blames his tools." But I think the saying, as I've always heard it used to suggest that someone who is complaining is a just bad at their job, is a backwards sentiment. Experts in their respective fields do not complain about their tools not because they are internalizing failure as their own fault. They don't complain because they insist on only using the best tools and thus have nothing to complain about.

Most people salaries transfers & healthcare offers literally run on a mix of CSV and XML!

CSV is probably the most low tech, stack-insensitive way to pass data even these days.

(I run & maintain long term systems which do exactly that).

Ah, such youthful ignorace.

You just classified probably every single bank in existence as "unserious organization"

  • Yep, healthcare, grocery, logistics, data science. Heck it would be easier to list industries that DON'T have any CSV. There aren't many.

    In terms of interchange formats these are quite popular/common: EDI (serialized as text or binary), CSV, XML, ASN.1, and JSON are extremely popular.

    I 100% assure everyone reading that their personal information was transmitted as CSV at least once in the last week; but once is a very low estimate.

  • They kind of actually are, though.

    Not because they use CSV's but because, as an industry, they have not figured out how to reliably create, exchange, and parse well-formed CSV's.

LOL, I chose a Google Sheet and CSV for my current project, and I'm very serious about it. It's a short-term solution, and it fits my needs perfectly.

> The kind of place that thinks junior developers are cheaper than senior developers…

Unless the junior developers start accepting lower salaries once they become senior developers, that is a fact. Do you mean that they think junior developers are cheaper even when considering the cost per output, maybe?

  • I believe they're referring to the fact that if almost all of your code is written by junior developers without mentorship, you will end up wasting a lot of your development budget because your codebase is a mess.