Years ago (2005?) I worked at a call center. Most agents were on one coast - data center was in another coast. Agents in our call center complained about spee

Years ago (2005?) I worked at a call center. Most agents were on one coast - data center was in another coast. Agents in our call center complained about speed. When they'd pull up an account, it was taking seconds... sometimes 15-20 seconds... to pull up the account. This was all a bespoke CRM system. I poked in the code (it was something I had access to) and noticed that ... the entirety of the whole screen was duped - the output of the client's history was embedded in an HTML comment tag. So... if the client had, say, 3 years of info/comments, it was rendered, then rendered again in HTML comments. It was a single line duplicating the entirety of the info. It was obviously a debug remnant. I removed it. I tried to talk to the original developer beforehand - he was on the phone, and kept waving me off. I emailed him. No answer. I committed it and got it to a testing server. The test guy immediately loved the speed improvement, and we got it out to the floor. There were about ... 50-70 agents live at any one time, and everyone's hold/wait times were cut by 20-30% overnight. Clients and agents were happier. I found out later that, over time, we cut bandwidth bills by a measurable amount. I was raked over the coals and nearly fired for that. "unprofessional", "insulting", etc. It was primarily because I'd made someone else look bad. Other people on the team also made changes now and then to each others' code without asking permission, when it was needed/obvious (emergencies/etc). It was a simple oversight in removing some debug code, and it made a huge difference (it had been tested and had other eyes on it as well - this wasn't "change prod by hand without telling anyone"). Still bugs me to this day (as you can tell).