[piratejon]

I don't have a basis for how long this might take. As the author mentions "All bugs become shallow once they can be reproduced.", but only after spending probably the largest amount of time waiting for new incident reports to come in, and then analyzing the reports (e.g. to determine most incidents occurred on the last day of the month), and hours staring at application and kernel code. It's very impressive, but certainly the largest amount of time in the 10 month duration was not actually debugging. The "moment of extraordinary clarity" probably sprung out of years of experience.

[Ensorceled]

Ah, I guess my thinking is that they didn't really focus on it. It was annoying but not high priority ... until they started to get an inkling of what was actually going on.

[silverfox17]

Agreed, about 99% of admins I know would not be able to identify this error, and most likely most Hacker News reads. The last sentence on your post is very true.

[lazide]

If not 99.999%

I’ve worked with (and been) a dev for several decades, and I can count on one hand the number of folks who would have a chance of figuring this out, and 2 fingers the number of folks who WOULD.

Of course, most never try to optimize or go so deep like this that they would ever need to, so there is that!