Re: [OT] Musings After Go-Live

docdwarf@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> ... and they can be horrifically complex... how do you calculate pay
> for a float-pool nurse from the Indian Health Service who reports
> regular hours, overtime hours, Sunday shift differential and paid
> holiday time in the same 24-hour shift? (Answer: it depends on
> whether they are covered by the union contract or not.) Add to this
> mixture the fact that these are peoples' paychecks being dealt with
> here, just about everyone looks at those closely and many are prone
> to make at least quiet murmurmings if the numbers are not to their
> liking.

How about a lawyer billing by the hour who takes a cross-country air trip -
crossing three time zones - and submits billing for 27 hours in one day?

> Now... the system I worked on converting takes input from four feeder
> systems, each of the feeders supplies data in a common format... but
> each of the feeders sends bad data down the line. As mentioned above
> the rules for paying people vary and what are invalid data for one
> person might be valid for another... rather than doing the Work to
> make sure that these rules are applied on the front-end to provide
> clean data folks follow Rule Number Zero ('Nobody wants to do any
> work') and send trash down the line. The folks who receive the trash
> complain, of course... but the recipients do not have the authority
> to cause change on the front-ends and are subject to the 'touched it
> last' rule; a pile o' crap gets dumped in their laps and it is up to
> them to make sure that folks get paid so folks don't get upset.

I agree that data should be validated at entry, that a report writer should
not have to make decisions about the integrity of a field. I worked on one
project, dirt-simple: Read a master file and create a report. One of the
fields (allegedly) contained the depth of the oil well in feet. Sometimes
the field had a number, say "4705," meaning the well was producing at 4,705
feet. Other times the field had a number like "-8650" meaning there was a
mile-and-a-half of pipe sticking up in the air.

Before I even got to that situation I asked: "In what order are these data?"
The answer was: "It depends on what was last done to the file." "You mean
you SORT the MASTER FILE?" I gasped. "Sure...."




.

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