Hang on, WTF? @PostOffInquiry witness Terence Austin (Sys Prog Dir) created a task force report to deal with the bugs on Horizon in 2001, and this is what an internal ICL/@Fujitsu_uk report on the status of team was: "Whoever wrote this code clearly has no..." #PostOfficeScandal

@brianwhelton @PostOffInquiry @fujitsu_uk That's why, as dev team lead, I conducted spot checks on the code of new team members till I was confident they were at least as good as me. I was occasionally horrified by what new contract programmers would write.

@james_christie @brianwhelton @PostOffInquiry @fujitsu_uk I remember picking up a similar system where they catered for US/UK date formats by switching any day/month where the day was <= 12 - just made no sense but must have passed a test at the time

@EdDebug @brianwhelton @PostOffInquiry @fujitsu_uk These people are out there writing code. Scary. I once caught a contractor writing a leap year 'calculation' instead of calling the appropriate utility. The following year was a leap year, so his check simply hard coded that year. His contract was up for renewal. He was binned.

@EdDebug @brianwhelton @PostOffInquiry @fujitsu_uk Incidentally, something Y2K taught us was how few people historically could code accurately for leap years. Some people knew about the century year exception (1900 wasn't), but hardly anyone understood the exception to the exception, if the year was divisible by 400, so 2000 was.

@james_christie @brianwhelton @PostOffInquiry @fujitsu_uk as you say the sort of thing to use a library for!

@EdDebug @brianwhelton @PostOffInquiry @fujitsu_uk I'm pretty sure some places' utilities botched the leap year calculation for 2000.