That would imply non-tech people having some surprisingly deep visibility into technical details. What they really see is Excel vs. some contractor doing "a system".
The reality is that Excel is available today and works, and scales up... well, until it doesn't. Still, you have data entry that everybody in the field understands, that's rock solid (so no need to unit test anything), and has a tried and true authentication module built in (a file sent from a government mail address). There's a risk of user errors, but the system will be working immediately[0]. Deployment can be done by anyone, as it's just clicking on File->New and starting to type data in.
Meanwhile, a "pigsqueal" solution will take half a year to design, produce and deploy (that's in an emergency, a year otherwise). And that's with competent IT people, and not someone who wants to profiteer off the crisis. Then you'll have to train the users, and hope the reality won't necessitate any changes, because they will take a while.
I think plenty of decent coders appreciate the fact that Excel is suitable for a surprisingly wide range of tasks, and that if you spot it widely used somewhere, it most likely means there isn't any comparable alternative available.
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[0] - Note that the user error that finally happened did not happen in the place where you'd expect it to.
The reality is that Excel is available today and works, and scales up... well, until it doesn't. Still, you have data entry that everybody in the field understands, that's rock solid (so no need to unit test anything), and has a tried and true authentication module built in (a file sent from a government mail address). There's a risk of user errors, but the system will be working immediately[0]. Deployment can be done by anyone, as it's just clicking on File->New and starting to type data in.
Meanwhile, a "pigsqueal" solution will take half a year to design, produce and deploy (that's in an emergency, a year otherwise). And that's with competent IT people, and not someone who wants to profiteer off the crisis. Then you'll have to train the users, and hope the reality won't necessitate any changes, because they will take a while.
I think plenty of decent coders appreciate the fact that Excel is suitable for a surprisingly wide range of tasks, and that if you spot it widely used somewhere, it most likely means there isn't any comparable alternative available.
--
[0] - Note that the user error that finally happened did not happen in the place where you'd expect it to.