I didn't realize it at the time, but I my first encounter with the "solves every problem with a spreadsheet" user type came very early in my career.
I worked in a computer lab in college, ca. 1989. One of my colleagues was in the mechanical engineering program, and had a bias generally for "solve the problem" over "elegant solution" or "appropriate tool" concerns. (I love the guy to this day, to be clear.)
When he first came to work at the lab, he was the only guy to have installed FORTRAN on his workstation. It didn't work well.
Then he discovered Lotus 1-2-3 and its macro language. He DELIGHTED in making the rest of horrified by creating all sorts of boundary-pushing utilities in Lotus macros. To be clear, he was at least 50% "doing a bit", and leaning into the "engineer only knows one tool" gag we'd all been riffing on. But he was still doing absurd stuff in Lotus that would've been better built in, say, Turbo Pascal or Turbo C.
I had no idea back then that this pattern would become so prevalent.
I worked at a law firm where the chief accountant (not the accounting manager, but the guy who made most of it work) did everything in Excel...including writing memos and other documents. I think the only other program he used was Outlook, and he probably drafted email in Excel.
I worked in a computer lab in college, ca. 1989. One of my colleagues was in the mechanical engineering program, and had a bias generally for "solve the problem" over "elegant solution" or "appropriate tool" concerns. (I love the guy to this day, to be clear.)
When he first came to work at the lab, he was the only guy to have installed FORTRAN on his workstation. It didn't work well.
Then he discovered Lotus 1-2-3 and its macro language. He DELIGHTED in making the rest of horrified by creating all sorts of boundary-pushing utilities in Lotus macros. To be clear, he was at least 50% "doing a bit", and leaning into the "engineer only knows one tool" gag we'd all been riffing on. But he was still doing absurd stuff in Lotus that would've been better built in, say, Turbo Pascal or Turbo C.
I had no idea back then that this pattern would become so prevalent.