What did you tell him was the monetary value? Let's say there are like 5 holidays per year that result in days where some people have holidays but others do not, so business meetings happen that day that get missed. Let's say you have a 100 million people using this calendar software. Let's say 0.5 percent of those are in the executive class. Furthermore, let's say 10% of them miss a meeting due to this UI issue. That's 50,000 missed meetings. If we handwave that each of those meetings could have resulted in $10 million deals for their company, this UI bug is costing customers half a trillion dollars!

So, after estimating the number of ping pong balls that fit on a 747, the thing to do is to go write the regexp and put that on your promo packet. Half a trillion dollars!

Obviously they meant monetary value for the software company. How much more revenue will they make if they implement it?

Sorry, let me clarify better (but it leads to similar issues)

On my iPhone[0] calendar I imported my Microsoft (work) and Google (personal) calendars, also having the iPhone calendar. If we take last Labor day as an example, if I don't disable the Holiday calendars in Microsoft and Google, I have 3 entries for Labor Day. Holidays sit at the top of the day so if I'm on my phone I basically won't see any other events. If I'm on my macbook and my Calendar is using 60% of my vertical space I see "Labor Day +3 more". Full screen I can see 4 maybe 5 entries....

So I can save a large chunk of real estate by doing a simple fucking 1 line regex. At the same time I can effectively merge the calendars, so I get to see the holidays that are in one but not the others.

Effectively, I can ACTUALLY SEE WHAT I HAVE SCHEDULED FOR THE DAY[1]

This, of course, also affects other things. Sometimes Google will add an event because I got an email later. Fuck, now I have dupes... Same thing happens with birthdays... Or you can hit that fun bug where you have for some god damn reason duplicate contacts with the same name, phone number, and birthday, you get triplicate calendar entries and merging[2] and results in quadruple entries!

I have missed so many fucking things because I didn't see it on my calendar[3]. And someone has the audacity to ask how much money would be saved? We've spent longer discussing the problem than it would take to fix it! These aren't junior people I'm talking to (who ask dumb things like "but I can't control or merge the other calendars" not recognizing it's a display issue), but like a L6 at Amazon.[4]

  > So, after estimating the number of ping pong balls that fit on a 747, the thing to do is to go write the regexp and put that on your promo packet.

[0] I've almost immediately regretted this decision...

[1] General frustration yelling, not yelling at you

[2] No, the "find duplicate contacts" option does not in fact find duplicate contacts (what fucking data are they looking for? Because it sure as hell isn't identical names. Why isn't it even trying to do similar names?!)

[3] I've also missed so many fucking things because that little scroll wheel wasn't completely finished with its animation and so saved the wrong day or switched AM to PM. I've missed so many things because I have so little control over notifications and they disappear not if I dismiss them, but if I just unlock my god damn phone. So not just that one liner needs to be done, but it would do a lot and these other one-liners would also greatly help.

[4] Dude was complaining about candidates using GPT to do leetcode problems and how he had a hard time figuring out if they were cheating or not. One of my many suggestions was "why not do in person interviews?" which was answered with how expensive plane tickets were (his interviewees were local) and contradicted his prior and later statements about how costly it is to hire/interview someone. I'm sorry, what percentage of 6 engineer's salaries to do 6 interviews for an hour is a single round trip ticket for a domestic flight? Or to have someone... drive in...