If I told someone I spent a week debugging a problem these days I think I would get laughed out of the call. Even a day might hit somw chuckles.

If you cant fix the bug just slop some code over it so its more hidden.

This is all gonna be fascinating in 5-10 years.

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seanw444 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This really does feel like a mass hysteria event. Bizarre to have to live through it.

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SlinkyOnStairs an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This does depend on who you are; If you're a senior with 10+ years of experience, it's a failure of your abilities to cut your losses or know when to seek help if you take far too long debugging something.

But for juniors, it's invaluable experience. And as a field we're already seeing problems resulting from the new generations of juniors being taught with modern web development, whose complexity is very obstructing of debugging.

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badc0ffee an hour ago | parent [-]

There are definitely situations where you can't ask for help and you can't turn your back on the bug.

I worked on a project that depended on an open source but deprecated/unmaintained Linux kernel module that we used for customers running RHEL[1]. There were a number of serious bugs causing panics that we encountered, but only for certain customers with high VFS workloads. I spent days to a week+ on each one, reading kernel code, writing userland utilities to repro the problem, and finally committing fixes to the module. I was the only one on the team up to the task.

We couldn't tell the customers to upgrade, we couldn't write an alternative module in a reasonable timeframe, and they paid us a lot of money, so I did what I had to do.

I'm sure there are lots of other examples like this out there.

[1] Known for its use of ancient kernels with 10000 patches hand-picked by Red Hat. At least at the time (5-10 years ago).

	▲	z500 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you for injecting some perspective into the thread of AI hysteria. I feel like everyone is imagining a bug in a CRUD app.