I was going to call your comment ridiculous but then I reread and saw that he actually did spend an entire day on it. Wow. Removing the trivial if chain you only have five lines! And it's not doing anything crazy, just a fold.

Let me put it this way: If I was the boss and Harry had spent the day learning about functional programming then okay sure whatever. But if he knew all the concepts he was using and spent the entire day just to pick one then there is a serious problem.