I did advanced mathematics and chose physics as one of my elective subjects in school. Nowadays, I do a lot of work based around analytics and forecasting.

"We need to find the average of this."

"That's easy. I'll do some more advanced stuff to really dial in the accuracy."

"Awesome. What's the timeframe?"

looks at million row dataset "To find the average? Like a month. Some of these numbers are mispelled words... Why are all these blank?"

"Oh, you'll have to read this 45 page document that outlines the default values."

And that's how roffice maths works. Lots and lots of if conditions, query merges, and meetings with other teams trying to understand why they entered in the thing they entered. By the time the data wrangling phase is complete, you give zero fucks about doing more than supplying the average.

[–] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 34 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Dang, I was really hoping this would be one of those stories that goes like:

"How long will that take?"

"It's a lot of data...like a month?" (But I actually wrote a Python script that compiles and formats it perfectly in like 5 minutes.)

"You're such a hard worker!"

[–] Renacles@lemmy.world 15 points 5 months ago

Shhhh

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