At my place of work, we pretty much always make the default (0) value “Unspecified”. The rationale is, it’s often quite useful to know that the originator has

At my place of work, we pretty much always make the default (0) value “Unspecified”. The rationale is, it’s often quite useful to know that the originator hasn’t specified a value, and to help new originators avoid unintended side-effects. This style guide has the same effect, but it’s implicit; takes a few more mental cycles to parse in exchange for less code. Personally, I think it’s probably worth the trade off to type it out once and save time thinking later.