Gunnar Kudrjavets

Paranoia is a virtue

Paying money to development/QA team for finding bugs ;-)

The title of one of the previous posts reminded me that I did relatively unusual thing during the last milestone - starting from specific date in milestone, I offered $1 for every bug people can find in the product I’m working on (Telephony Application Services). The success criterion was that bug will get accepted and fixed by the end of the milestone.

Reaching closer to the official milestone exit dates, I increased the sum to $5 per bug. Finally I ended up writing checks for ~$40 (don’t remember the precise sum and too lazy to look it up now). Some members of my team have still their checks hanging on the wall ;-)

A couple of weeks later, while looking at my bank statement, I noticed that one person actually cashed in one $1 check and one $5 check. I was pretty amused by this ;-) Isn’t it great, want to buy a new shiny BMW? All you have to do is find enough quality bugs ;-)

Posted: Feb 25 2004, 12:34 PM by gunnarku | with 2 comment(s)
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A random swede said:

Hehe cool :) That's one of the few things that you can only do with checks. Did you know that the U.S. is pretty much the only country in the world where money checks are still actively used? Everywhere else electronic transfers have almost completely replaced the check system. I'm 20 and I've never seen a check in my life except for american checks.

It's very annoying for me since I'm a European selling PocketPC software through online firms in the US, and they give me the money by mailing checks, which cost me about $10 to sell to the banks here. There simply isn't much of a check handling infrastructure left, and the only things passing through it are the odd american checks, according to the bank people I've talked to.

Seems like another funny case of US being totally out of sync with the world, just like with the imperial versus metric system :)
# February 25, 2004 4:39 PM

Gunnar Kudrjavets [MSFT] said:

I know what you mean ;-) From 1995 till 1998 I was working on electronic banking systems back in Estonia. We had capability to do practically everythign through either modem or TCP/IP connection: transfers between different accounts (in different banks), foreign transfers, currency exchange, scheduling cash withdrawals, buying/selling stock etc. Damn, I miss this ...
# February 25, 2004 4:51 PM
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