Technology

Excel depends on the usage. Way too many people want to use it for what it's bad at, but technically can do, instead of using it for what it's good at.

I'm fairly decent at using Excel, and have automated some database dependent tasks for my coworkers through it, which saves us a lot of time doing menial tasks no one actually wants to do.

I willingly learned excel in the past 15 years!

I have since moved on to open source replacements.

I did and it's awesome. People like to shit on Excel, but there is a reason why every business on earth runs on Excel. It's a great tool and if you really learn it, you can do great things with it.

I love excel, personally. I'm a big ol' nerd and love putting shit in a spreadsheet.

Funny thing about "AI skills" that I've noticed so far is that they are actually just skills in the thing you're trying to get AI to help with. If you're good at that, you can often (though not always) get an effective result. Mostly because you can talk about it at a deeper level and catch mistakes the AI makes.

If you have no idea about the thing, it might look competent to you, but you just won't be catching the mistakes.

In that context, I would call them thought amplifiers and pretty effective at the whole "talking about something can help debug the problem, even if the other person doesn't contribute anything of value because you have to look at the problem differently to explain it and that different perspective might make the solution more visible", while also being able to contribute some valueable pieces.

how else are you going to perform, document, and communicate engineering calculations in a format that is simple, intuitive, flexible, and easy to iterate upon?

I did take a few courses on excel over the last 25 years. I don't use excel that much but most features will never be used by most people.

Yeah, very good analogy actually...

I remember back in the day people putting stuff like 'Microsoft Word' under 'skills'. Instead of thinking 'oh good, they will be able to use Word competently', the impression was 'my god, they think Word is a skill worth bragging about, I'm inclined to believe they have no useful skills'.

'Excel skills' on a resume is just so vague, people put it down when they just figured out they can click and put things into a table, some people will be able to quickly roll some complicated formula, which is at least more of a skill (I'd rather program a normal way than try to wrangle some of the abominations I've seen in excel sheets).

Using an LLM is not a skill with a significant acquisition cost. To the extent that it does or does not work, it doesn't really need learning. If anything people who overthink the 'skill' of writing a prompt just end up with stupid superstitions that don't work, and when they first find out that it doesn't work, they just grow new prompt superstitions to add to it to 'fix' the problem.