posted 15 years ago
No clue what he was thinking.
I do know that Fannie Mae used to use a lot of IT contractors. This is in addition to the 800 or so full time IT employees. They had systems implemented on nearly every platform sold in the past 30 years, including NextStep, Mac, VMS, IBM's MVS, NetWare, assorted Windows servers and clients.
They once made the press for a $900 million accounting error, this is ~2001 or so. The cause was that the accounts were kept in Excel spreadsheets, and the guy doing it added a row without making the sum() functions include the row. What the press didn't cover was that he didn't notice it because it was in a spreadsheet dealing with tens and hundreds of billions of dollars, and so the error was only a fraction of a percent, and "seemed OK" to the guy.