Please push back when you are right

I recently received a bug report: a reprinted invoice total didn’t match the original hard copy. Getting your financials wrong never feels good…

Fortunately, after restoring backups in a test database for far too long, I found the missing line item.

Long story short, one of the administrators deleted a line item the was flagged as already invoiced, ie are you really really sure you want to delete this?

Here’s the problem. When this was originally built about 6 years ago, I strongly recommended not allowing it at all. The concern was that there might be a time where we must be able to delete something that we now think deleted. So I said fine, and it was built.

If I were doing this today, I would have recommended a different approach:

• Do a soft delete.
• Only allow invoices to be voided/reissued.
• Just say no. They want it today, but will regret it later.
• Discuss other options.

One of the differences between a junior and a senior engineer is that a junior will just do as told. A senior engineer has seen that go badly enough times to know to push back.