This really hit close to home. Many years ago a project manager said the same thing to me. Unfortunately in that case, Sam's new deadline validator has much mor

This really hit close to home. Many years ago a project manager said the same thing to me. Unfortunately in that case, Sam's new deadline validator has much more simplified requirements than the developer's. The developer's deadline validator takes ten function arguments to customize its behavior in various ways. One of the arguments, a stringly typed argument allows the validator to match the fraction of the second against a string. Sam thought providing the empty string "" would ask the validator to accept all possible fractional values, but unfortunately it requires the magic string "*" to accept all possible fractional values and the empty string "" only allows zero fractional values, i.e. the deadline must be an integral number of seconds. An outage happened because the system rejected every single deadline that's not an integral number of seconds.