Re: "six-eyes" policy
That process is not quite as insane as it sounds, given history. This is clearly an implementation of double-entry accounting. Well, an implementation. Done quite poorly.
"You sent a code monkey to do the work of a software engineer."
Someone said, "People adding all these numbers make mistakes. Bring in a programmer to fix that." And so they did--the "programmer" took their manual double-entry process exactly, created a UI that matched the accounting book, dropped the data into a database, and voila! No more accounting errors! And look how fast it reconciles the books!
Of course proper software engineering, especially in the fifties or sixties, would have said things like "When we set up a loan repayment system, we'll prepopulate all the fields with the correct data. Any changes will be flagged alert checkers." And, "The purpose of double-entry accounting is to prevent human error. Since we're using systems whose chance of error in computation is minuscule compared to the chance in human error in data entry, we should design this system to do the double entry itself. The operator should never get the chance to enter a value which can be computed."
Biting the hand that feeds IT
