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> done something grossly incompetent like used floats for those calculations

So, in another life I worked on reporting software for a foreign branch of a US bank. You've heard of the bank. You would probably recognize the CEO's name, in fact.

We had been fucking this up for years. I fixed it. We had some customers who yelled at us because our reports were "wrong" i.e. they were double checking our work and apparently making the same mistake. They could not be reasoned with. Bear in mind, we're talking about differences of pennies, or a few dollars on very large transactions. Some of our customers insisted we were calculating the values incorrectly and demanded we "fix" it.

What do you think happened next? You have one guess.




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