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The original was posted on /r/talesfromtechsupport by /u/Elegant-Winner-6521 on 2025-01-20 11:37:49+00:00.
I had a request in from company CEO to change a fundamental database two-letter ID to match another analysis field ID. E.g. in one table a thing has the ID of "CE" and the corresponding analysis ID in another table has the ID of "CD".
I understand that request in principle. You'd ideally want these to line up so that you can easily align reporting metrics and keep things generally tidy and easy to follow. In foresight, this would have been a very sensible approach to naming conventions.
Here's the problem. These IDs are literally 20 years old at this point. We're talking a company with maybe 15 different branches in different locations, hundreds of staff, terabytes of data going back decades millions or tens of millions of records. It predates several company mergers. It affects reporting, automations, validations, all sorts of things. And the reason this ID is a comical 2-letters is because it's basically one of the most fundamental things you would set up in this system before you had any data.
The other thing is that this is quite easily solved with sensible coding anyway. The IDs don't need to match, however much you might want them to visually.
I asked why he wants to change the prefix (assuming it was something to do with how they need their reporting to function going forward), and he said "it's just annoying that it's not the same. I want them to be uniform."
I'm still figuring out the best way to deal with this one. I know this CEO to be a pedantic ass about stuff like this. I suspect he thinks it's entirely reasonable to have his entire company implode for a couple of weeks just so that he can look at this one two-letter prefix and feel happier that it looks right.
How does one politely say, "you may as well ask to realign the foundations of your house because it's a couple of degrees not-parallel with the pavement."