My favourite example of this from my own career... automating timesheet -> payroll processing in a unionized environment. As we're converting the collective bargaining agreement into code, we discover that there are a pair of rules that seem contradictory. Go talk to someone in the payroll department to try to figure out how it's handled. Get an answer that makes decent sense, but have a bit of a lingering doubt about the interpretation. Talk to someone else in the same department... they tell us the alternative interpretation.

Bring the problem back to our primary contact and they've got no clue what to do. They're on like year 2 of a 7 year contract and they've just discovered that their payroll department has been interpreting the ambiguous rules somewhat randomly. No one wants to commit to an interpretation without a memorandum of understanding from the union, and no one wants to start the process of negotiating that MoU because it's going to mean backdating 2 years of payroll for an unknown number of employees, who may have been affected by it one month but not the next, depending on who processed their paystub that month.

That was fun :D

Wouldn’t the simplest thing possible in that case probably just use one of the many SaaS payroll services? If the second largest employer in the US can use ADP, I’m almost sure your company could.

I left out some details, it wasn’t only payroll, there was some other staff management aspects to it. But overall the answer about using ADP for this particular situation is: no.

Not strictly for technical reasons, but definitely for political reasons. The client was potentially the largest organization in my province (state-run healthcare). Outsourcing payroll and scheduling with the potential of breaking the rules in the contracts with the multiple union stakeholders was a completely non-starter. Plus the idea of needing to do lay offs within the payroll department was pretty unpalatable.

Heh, to make it more fun… it wasn’t actually clear if they were overpaying or underpaying. Underpaying is actually a lot easier to deal with than overpaying. If you underpay someone, the easy solution is to write a cheque and include interest and/or some other form of compensation for the error.

If you overpay someone… getting that money back is a challenge.

To make it more complicated still, there was an element of “we’re not sure if we overpaid or underpaid” but there was also an element of “we gave person X an overtime shift but person Y was entitled to accept or deny that shift before person X would have even had an opportunity to take it”. That’s even harder to compensate for.

Thank you for the reply. I was only commenting that wage theft is still wage theft even when there is no malicious intent. Clearly, reality is much more nuanced.

Or overpaying them. Or sometimes underpaying and sometimes overpaying them. Or paying them the right total amount, but incorrectly labelling subtotals.

There’s no reason to leap to ‘stealing’ (which requires intent) from ‘ambiguous rules.’ Those ambiguous rules, incidentally, may have been agreed to — or even insisted on — by the union!