OceanGate’s ill-fated Titan sub relied on a hand-typed Excel spreadsheet

Jesus Christ that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. The submarine in the game Iron Lung was safer to drive than this thing.
But Wilby said that for the Titan, the coordinate data was transcribed into a notebook by hand and then entered into Excel before loading the spreadsheet into mapping software to track the sub’s position on a hand-drawn map of the wreckage.
The OceanGate team tried to perform these updates at least every five minutes, but it was a slow, manual process done while communicating with the gamepad-controlled sub via short text messages.
Updates every FIVE MINUTES?! I wouldn't even trust this thing in a damn swimming pool.
- I really do wonder why they ended up in this. It can' be that hard to make even a hacky DIY system to do it automatically. The navigation system just had to have some digital or even analog output, then it would be just the problem of interpreting the signal with some script and writing it into a file.
  When Wilby recommended the company use standard software to process ping data and plot the sub’s telemetry automatically, the response was that the company wanted to develop an in-house system, but didn’t have enough time.
  
  To write a script, you need someone who can write scripts.
  If all you have is someone who can write VLOOKUPs in Excel, and the CEO is too cheap to hire someone, then that's what you use.
  
  I really do wonder why they ended up in this. It can’ be that hard to make even a hacky DIY system to do it automatically.
  All-manager team, no devs?
  
  I like how the company didn't consider using standard software to do it, and then switch to the in-house system that they made later, instead of just having it done by hand instead.
- There are better ways to do that even in Excel!
  
  Right? I work with plenty of users in non-technical roles who have at best rudimentary Excel skills, and even they could figure out a better way to manage this. The whole thing with Excel is to make basic data work accessible even to a rube, and let them do an incredible amount of things otherwise outside their skillet.
  Using Excel like this is like giving someone a microwave and they only use it as a kitchen timer.
- What's worse is that half the coordinates probably ended up as dates...
  
  Or comma separated values...F, that,,
- Man if it wasn't for that kid that was probably dragged into this, I'd be fucking rolling rn. How fucking stupid do you have to be to not see the sea of red flags???

According to Ross, six days before the Titan submarine imploded, the sub’s pilot and the company’s cofounder, Stockton Rush, crashed the vessel into a launch mechanism bulkhead while the vessel was attempting to resurface from dive 87. […] but Ross said he did not know if an inspection of the sub was carried out afterward.
How does every new detail about the excursion keep getting worse? Next week I’m going to learn they used Saran wrap for the windows.
- The sub was totaled. Like you need to change a helmet after a crash even it it looks fine
- It is my understanding that Rush also hard-bottomed the sub (crashed into the sea floor) while diving to the Andrea Doria. And was a little piss baby about it the entire time.
  That's apparently a shorter version of the video I'd seen previously; eventually Rush does hand over the controls, by throwing the playstation controller at the guy's head.
  
  As if I needed more reasons to be happy he was reduced to a fine paste
- i wonder if it would have made the trip without that crashing. not that it matters much, but wow. how insanely stupid!
  
  It was always a matter of when, not if.
- And the week after that, we'll find out that the sub didn't even go into the ocean. They crushed it in a car compactor.

It's a good thing that no serious company uses excel spreadsheets to manage their data, right? Right?
- Of course not! We employees of Fortune 500 companies use Google Sheets to manage critical data.
  It's in the cloud, that's how you know it's good.
  (I'm not even joking....our VP said this)
  
  Excel effectively forces cloud usage now if you want to use autosave. And frankly, Microsoft is doing everything it can to shift users to cloud based Office apps.
  They really, really want users and business owners to think of the local data storage and desktop computing as secondary to OneDrive and Webapps. I swear at some point in the future the consumer version of Windows will be little more than the Edge browser in a wig.
  
  I just wish the whole 'cloud' thing would die in a ditch specifically for people like that.
  No, most use-cases don't need to be in a cloud.
  You are 99.9% paying more for that setup than having people who understand servers.
  And if you need the cloud, then hooray for you, but it should not need to be subsidized by thousands of small customers who jumped on the wrong train.
- Be me, postal worker. One of our machines uses a csv file to attach zip codes to bins. See fresh engineer decide to change one zip code in notepad really quick. See file's formatting get wrecked. Spend next 6 hours watching all the mail spit out of the very last bin every time they think they finally fix it as if machine has irritable bowel syndrome. Engineer earns nickname 'boy wonder' first week on job
  
  This is why I always save contents as a new file instead of overwriting the original one when I'm using a machine that isn't mine. I've been burned so many times by flimsy newline characters, proper unicode support, legacy encoding and many other stuff you assume it should be already in place.
- There are teams where I work that are basically using Excel as a database and SharePoint as S3 in automated processes… But at least no one is going to DIE when those things fall over!
- Not us, ours are google sheets
  
  I think it's a hole in education. Unless you go to school for IT or programming the most advanced thing you're probably going to be taught is spreadsheet, and yet out in the world of business you need actual database software, and Excel can kinda sorta look like it's somewhat accomplishing that for a while so that's what gets used.
  When the only tool society has been taught exists is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
- cries in data analyst
  Did you know our company is over a thousand years old, possibly even two? Recent dives into our digital archives have unearthed invoice records dated to the year 1021, though we're also investigating the validity of one dated to 215.
  Whoever decided to make dates a manual entry text field without validation should be forced to write SQL by hand, without syntax highlighting, autocompletion, syntax checks, reference or looking up stuff, querying a database with no schema or data dictionary.

I will never get over how much media attention this gets.
- It's like an oasis in the desert right now. Everyone can look at this crazy spectacle and ignore all the polarized and heart-wrenching crazy bs that the rest of the news is full of.
- Watching some of the hearing, they should be paying attention to how underfunded OSHA is. The agent assigned to one of the whistleblowers had several jobs in front of that case and never got to it before it was dropped. The company was also run on a cult of personality and anyone with any sense either left on their own or were driven out.
  
  Does this actually fall under OSHA? I have no idea who governs regulations for private submarines lol
  But this would also be crazy low priority if it was OSHA, I imagine. The people working on (doing maintenance on) the sub weren't in danger, right? So just four to five people who sign waivers every few months? Fuck that take a look at some more meat packing factories.
- It’s the only way the media is allowed to point out how stupid and useless the ultra-wealthy are. For some reason the media owners allow this little bit of dunking, as a treat.
  
  this little bit of dunking
  Ha I see what you did there

So do 90% of corporations.
- 90% of corporations aren't transcribing positioning data by hand every five minutes to figure out the sub's position.

I have a little pet theory I've been stewing about when it comes to penny wise/pound foolish decisions from business owners of all types. From landlords, to local cafes, and all the way up to Fortune 500 CEOs. It comes down to bad accounting.
I've taken to setting aside money into buckets. There's a bucket that handles some filter replacements for our home furnace (it's a 5 inch thick HEPA filter, so it's bit pricey) and under sink RO system, for example. When it comes time to buy one, I just pull from that bucket. It doesn't feel like I'm losing anything off my usual budget for the month. The money is just there, and it feels nice to be able to pay without worry. It almost feels like a reward for good planning.
Companies do this, as well. In fact, I helped setup a similar system at my local community makerspace (which runs as a 501c)3). We pay into buckets for things like insurance every month, and then we pay it when the bill comes due each year. Again, it doesn't feel like we're stressed for anything.
Not all companies do this, or if they do, they don't do it for everything. If you're not setting aside a little bucket for something that you know will come up, then it has to be paid out of your general funds. That's money you wanted to use for something more fun than furnace filters or insurance or a software package that can process navigation data automatically.
So when you see billionaires or landlords complain about something important being too expensive, it might be because they aren't tracking their accounting buckets properly. If this keeps happening, that's a good indication that they are anything but a glorious Captain of Industry.
- My son is kinda struggling with his allowance money. I might not be the greatest example or at least, a good financial teati him.
  But the other day, my friend told me their kids received a special wallet with envelopes inside. Exactly the kind of buket system you describe.
  So I'm going to buy this for both my kids, I think it's going to be helpful for them.
  
  Get yourself one too
- I would add to this that almost all the companies I have worked for (from local businesses to multi national corps) constantly "save" money by hiding it in labor costs. There is some line item or other thing that is clearly definable on a budget and so they will outsource it in some capacity and then pat themselves on the back for the cost savings. However, what ends up happening is the resulting product that comes in is dog shit and it forces the people on the ground to fix it or otherwise make it work.
  Most regular people just want to do their job and not rock the boat, so rather than make this new issue a pain point for management, they just deal with it. Over time those types of things start to add up and burn people out, but the higher ups are never directly effected and so I think they get a weird sense of anything they say ultimately "just working out".

Man, a hand typed spreadsheet must have been hard to navigate with the PlayStation controller.
- What an incredible sentence.
- It wasn't even a PlayStation controller, it was a knockoff Logitech controller shaped like a DualShock but with Xbox colored buttons.

Good thing the world didn't lose anything valuable.
- Hey, that was an ok controller they used to navigate
  
  That was a Player 2 controller if ever I saw one.

Everything I hear about this contraption is worse than I expected.
- Come on now, Excel isn't that bad.
  
  For the right jobs, it's a good tool.
  This isn't the right job.

There were so many things relating to this incident that bewildered me. The titanium end caps were stuck on using glue, by hand. Also, while carbon fiber is great at handling tensile loads at 14 PSI, it's not so great at handling compressive ones at 5500 PSI. For such a delicate mission, the whole thing seemed unprofessional in so many ways.
- Supposedly the glued on titanium is the same thing the US Army does for their small Submarines, though I'm sure they found some way to cheap out/fuck up.
  
  Probably were using expired glue, as Stockton Rush boasted about using discounted carbon fiber from Boeing that was past its shelf life for usage in airplanes.
  
  Well, they did it just out in the open in some dusty warehouse. Comments I've read say that's a pretty big deal.

I don't know how these guys didn't get a Darwin award yet
- A Darwin award isn't given, it is earned. And they earned it when they died.
- Those giving out the awards want to wait and see if someone dies over laughter about this event. Then they'll get the award.

The more you hear about this sub the worse it gets.
I'm not surprised, of course, given the shortcuts Rush was determined to take.
Also it's the first time I saw the picture in that article of the other crushed remains. I'm pretty impressed they could get pictures that deep.