$0 forced billing

While adding a new feature to the accounting section of a web app, something that didn’t seem quite right prompted my boss to have me look into the inner workings of the way billable time was being tracked. After an in-depth search, I found one single line of code that made absolutely zero sense, and had no comments nearby. It was actually forcing the billed time length to be set equal to zero in one particular case.

Oops.

As the sole developer in the small business where I work, I had nobody else to blame. After fixing the bug and recalculating all incorrectly un-billed work (which the company ate for PR reasons), it ended up being about $2,800 worth of time. If you’ve ever got that sick feeling in your stomach over something like that, you know exactly how I felt.

If you value your career:

Use obvious TODO comments anywhere that you intentionally break code for the purpose of testing.