Re: One million lines of code... Sigh...
What "comPetent" "veteran" "software designer" doesn't vet date problems? Sounds like that "developer" did not want to force the users to put dates in specific date fields and use those fields in boilerplate reports and letters components.
I despise developers who allow users to enter any old random shit in any field the user chooses just "because data type entry enforcement slows us down" is what power-wielding users/buyers will sometimes bandy about.
(In the early 90's, I once temped at a famous "memory leak detector" software developer. I and 2 others had to trudge through MS Access to clean up data so that future sales types (replacing the ones who must've been binned, I sometimes wondered, or for future investors) who entered phone numbers in conversation fields, addresses partially in phone numberr fields, states in the city fied, and so on. It was horrendous, mind-boggling, and blood-pressure boiling, and I'd only been at home playing with Lotus Approach for under two years or so.
It was supposed to be a 1-week contract, or maybe it was 4 or 5 days, but after two days of that shit, and the ratty interface cobbled by some wannabe or unfortunate Access interace putter-togetherer, it seemed to me it would take 3 weeks or longer to comb through multiple thousands of records and make the data all-right and alright. I recommended Lotus Approach for this task, not to replace Access, but to from a non-programmatic, data-entry-clerk-on-limited-time basis. I convinced the in-charge developer I knew what I was doing and of what my limitations were, and what I'd done at home with Approach. He permitted me to install it and give him a quick run-through of what my plan was, and after a few minutes, green-lit it. We did the task in around 3.5 or 4 days total rather than the 2-weeks or so it was clearly becoming as we earlier kept uncovering more and more SHIT entered by uncaring, clueless, reckless sales/marketing people who obviously did not value a need to revisit and make sense of the data.
Similarly, I did this at 2 or 3 other South Bay offices but staffed with fewer than 20 people, NONE of whom wanted nor had time to do this "drudgery" type of work. Unfortunately for my ego, Approach was usually never to stay around and take hold. Ditto in the mid 2000s when I again was at (larger) firms with maybe 5,000 employees and 10s of thousands of records, one problem being sifting out related, duplicate, and possibly fraudulent multiple (dozens) entries of employees for pay enhancement purposes. At least, that is sometimes what seemed to keep popping up in my face as I kept relating sites to employees. I was not privvy to SSN information, so, I was not able to fully settle my suspicions. Still, in that industry, it would not be uncommon for employees to be related to each other by 2-4 people. Unfortunately, some relatives had very similar or identical middle or between names.)