Remix.run Logo
ZaoLahma 7 hours ago

> That said, unless fixing a bug requires a significant refactor/rewrite, I can’t imagine spending more than a day on one.

The longer I work as a software engineer, the rarer it is that I get to work with bugs that take only a day to fix.

ChrisMarshallNY 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I've found the opposite to be true, in my case.

ZaoLahma 6 hours ago | parent [-]

For me the longer I work, the worse the bugs I work with become.

Nowadays, after some 17 years in the business, it's pretty much always intermittently and rarely occurring race conditions of different flavors. They might result in different behaviors (crashes, missing or wrong data, ...), but at the core of it, it's almost always race conditions.

The easy and quick to fix bugs never end up with me.

lll-o-lll 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yep. Non-determinism. Back in the day it was memory corruption caused by some race condition. By the time things have gone pop, you’re too far from the proximate cause to have useful logs or dumps.

“Happens only once every 100k runs? Won’t fix”. That works until it doesn’t, then they come looking for the poor bastard that never fixes a bug in 2 days.

ChrisMarshallNY 6 hours ago | parent [-]

My first job was as an RF (microwave) bench technician. My initial schooling was at a trade school for electronic technicians.

It was all about fixing bugs; often, terrifying ones.

That background came in handy, once I got into software.

lll-o-lll 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I started life as an engineer. Try reverse engineering why an electrical device your company designed (industrial setting, so big power), occasionally and I mean, really really rarely, just explodes; burying its cover housing half way through the opposite wall.

Won’t fix doesn’t get accepted so well. Trying to work out what the hell happened from the charred remains isn’t so easy either.

ChrisMarshallNY 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Sounds like some great stories.

ChrisMarshallNY 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The reward for good work, is more work.

I tend to mostly work alone, these days (Chief Cook & Bottle-Washer).

All bugs are mine.