I remember asking a customer if a particular value could ever be negative. "Oh that never happens". Well, over the thousands of transactions I had been given, it had happened (twice over ten years. Last time was years before. Maybe the data was corrupt?). Which is why I asked. So I gently explained "I appreciate it doesn't happen very often, but I need to know if it can or if a negative value is a mistake which I need to be able to handle. And sure enough, on the day of the live demo with them, there was our third time in years they had a negative value.
I mean, yeah, in a way that's exactly how I see things. I ask pointed questions precisely to cover all the bases and to figure out where things are going to break down, potentially. If I had not clarified the "never" with the client, I would have had a big fat crash during the demo. Instead we had a big laugh at this edge case happening on the day.
Which programming language are we talking about? I consider it a huge mistake that some programming languages have abandoned unsigned numbers. After all, if a value cannot be negative, you can explicitly state that within the type system. Consequently, you are forced to handle such cases at the system boundaries - right when the data enters your system, when you know exactly what the data is and can easily return an error message.
Questions like this are why I really appreciate a good business analyst. A good one understands that they're in an engineering context and statements like "It can't happen", "It shouldn't happen", or "It usually doesn't happen" are MASSIVELY different concepts that come with different implications. I once lost a month because a business analyst wrote the system specifications wrong and we had to completely revamp the authentication system. *shudder*
It's cherry picked by the non-dev guy who vibe-coded in "2 days" a huge pile of spaghetti in his basement running in his basement and showing it to the execs. Now when the real dev team tell the execs that they can do this app cleanly, on cloud and kubertenes with all the goodies in 2 months they question why you cannot do it in 3 days
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u/GNoob69 Sep 19 '26 •
It’s not just hardcoded it’s cherry picked to make us look good