[agroot12]

"After that, participants solved mentally active programming tasks (coding) and monotonous ones (debugging)" ... this is a surprising take. Debugging, as the saying goes, is often like a murder mystery. Edit: I dont' think the authors are wrong about that, since they have observed the participants, I assume they chose a monotonous debugging task.

[pjerem]

I’ve been surprised by this too.

Maybe it’s a personal preference after all but my ADHD brain for sure prefers debugging.

Debugging is sometimes more challenging and the boundaries are clearly defined : you know how the program should behave and you know when you get it. You know what doesn’t work so it’s easy to go TDD : when the test is green you are good to go !

Whereas writing new code is a pain for my dopamine system because I never know when it’s done.

Getting the boring feature to work is easy but finishing is horrible.

Figuring if you managed every edge cases, if you wrote enough tests, if you respected the team defined architecture, that’s hard.

[johnchristopher]

> Maybe it’s a personal preference after all but my ADHD brain for sure prefers debugging.

> Debugging is sometimes more challenging and the boundaries are clearly defined : you know how the program should behave and you know when you get it. You know what doesn’t work so it’s easy to go TDD : when the test is green you are good to go !

> Whereas writing new code is a pain for my dopamine system because I never know when it’s done.

Oooooh, that fits with my drifting towards debugging other's code (even when I have 0 experience with the language) and debugging infrastructure configuration.

I sometimes think I may have some ADHD traits but I don't believe I have it. Though I recently decided to adopt some ADHD strategies to organize my home/life and it has had some effects/benefits.

Maybe I should pivot harder away from coding and drift towards sysadmin.

[xmcqdpt2]

As I was writing in another comment, I have a very clear deficit of attention and I love debugging! Especially when it's urgent, and I'm basically livecoding in front of other devs or clients, jumping about in our codebase, hacking through breakpoints and the interactive console.

It helps that JVM debugging is very good (can be done remotely over the network, can insert code, add conditional breakpoints, suspend single threads etc.) It's an almost lisp like experience!

And a bug report is the most scoped task I ever encounter frankly. You have a clear success condition, often a pretty clear deadline ("now!" or "before the release window"!) In fact, if anything I tend to take support tasks way too often, to the detriment of my feature building work.

When I get an email with a title like "Intermittent null pointer exception in running prod application", I just know I'll have a really good few days!

[extasia]

From what I skim read the debugging task involved finding places where the wrong type of indentation was used (python)

So I'd describe it as pretty monotonous, even if most debugging isn't!

[xmcqdpt2]

Oh that explains it! I never have to do this, because computers are very good at it.