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by jessaustin 2938 days ago
Correctness is huge. The other day a colleague and I were figuring out some things about scheduled work days over the next few years. After I had futzed about in a spreadsheet for five minutes, he said "this is ridiculous!" and started furiously paging through a paper calendar. We had our results nearly simultaneously, but he was off by over a month. After that we just used the spreadsheet.
1 comments

Correctness also works the other way around. We needed to link to databases with non-matching customer IDs, the analyst on the team spent several hours automating fuzzy matching of customer names in R before we concluded it was easier and more correct to build a mapping table by hand for the few 100 that didn’t match.