>>My first introduction to this way of thinking was many years ago when I worked on a software development project and the project manager was extremely concerned about a single cent being wrong in the calculations
On one of of my previous contracting gigs (about 20 years ago), for a very large, USA-based financial services company, the VP hired me for a full month (at consultants pay rate, 40 hrs a week) to investigate and track down a 1-cent discrepancy in $4,000,000,000 under assets for a particular division that differed between two reports by exactly 1 penny(one generated on the mainframe/cobol system, and one generated on a custom pc based system).
Turned out it was a rounding error in like the 8th decimal place on the mainframe side. I thought it was crazy at the time - but guess his thinking was there is no difference between being a penny off, or a million dollars off - you need to be able to account for every cent.
On one of of my previous contracting gigs (about 20 years ago), for a very large, USA-based financial services company, the VP hired me for a full month (at consultants pay rate, 40 hrs a week) to investigate and track down a 1-cent discrepancy in $4,000,000,000 under assets for a particular division that differed between two reports by exactly 1 penny(one generated on the mainframe/cobol system, and one generated on a custom pc based system).
Turned out it was a rounding error in like the 8th decimal place on the mainframe side. I thought it was crazy at the time - but guess his thinking was there is no difference between being a penny off, or a million dollars off - you need to be able to account for every cent.