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I am a former IT director, and self-taught in every IT discipline of the people I had to manage, which was part employees and part long term consultants.

Excel had to be taught to many parts of our company’s staff, which was a business in the pension & health insurance industry, with out own inhouse investment department, fund accounting, actuarial programs (that we developed in house) security portfolio management systems and over-night after market close revaluation of funds.

My staff and I got dragged into learning so many financial, investment and actuarial matters because my boss, the CEO didn’t believe anyone in the world could invent the software systems we needed, exactly as “we meeded” (more as ‘he wanted’, with his CPA, doctorate of law and only 1 exam away from full fledged actuary).

My team was not giant, and so I had to dig inside many things myself, to keep things going on expected timelines, and in the process learned and mastered various programming lanuguages, computer network systems, desktop applications (the whole MS office suite, verious databases and SQL database, verious reporting platforms like Crystal reports, and many other things.

My hires always told me they did not think the “boss” in my position would know so much about the details of what they would do as I did. I had to.

Then later when I became a consultant, a client asked if I wanted to help out with developing a segment of their in-house Intranet. Though I had never done HTML or Java before, I accepted the task (along with others I was on) and within a couple weeks was on the way to creating over 100 web-pages of their Intranet - learning by “reverse engineering” all I could gather on their Inrarnet and the Internet at large.

All “proghramming” is the same, just a different language. Mastering a new one is like working out a translation, which you know must do the same basic things, just differently.

For our pension and accounting staff we developed complex spreadsheets for not just day to day functions, but major financial projections and reporting as well.

In the actuarial area we devedloped a dynamic actuarial mortality factor calculation process based on an industry accepted standard of by how much, year by year, mortality (life expectancy) has been improving.

At a month to month level the change from the last published factor (every ten years) is small, but when you are looking at a projected retirement not expected to occur for another 1,5,10,15,20+ years the final mortality factor grows, dynamically, and produces a factor more in line with what mortality is now expected to be then. In simple terms, a male retiring now at age 65 would have a different (smaller) mortality factor (years left to live) than a male who WILL BE age 65 when they expect/are looking to retire ten years away. By getting the factor adjusted dynamically, benefits to be paid were being dynamically adjusted to account for an improving mortality (life expectancy) over the years.

Phew - -——

That we personally got into because my boss got into the project to satisfy his own actuarial desires, and constantly my staff of consultants and I had to decode and recode his “spaghetti” code.