[HPsquared]

Do students get much practice in debugging and root cause analysis on existing systems? That's something people do a lot of at work, but perhaps not students so much. I'd imagine students work more in a clean "green-field" environment.

Kind of like experience gained as a plumber working with dirty clogged real pipes in a basement, vs doing exercises in plumbing school with new pipes and theory about pipe sizes, gradients etc. In other words, school can only give part of the picture.

[tux3]

They get to debug their own code. That's different from debugging a large multi MLOC system, but they're also students, you have to start small.

[pjmlp]

You can get to do that at CERN as summer student, or similar research institute, depending on the luck which department one lands on.

And great parties as well.

[denton-scratch]

> Do students get much practice in debugging and root cause analysis on existing systems?

It's a waste of a student's time. Deep debugging isn't just one set of skills; each problem is different. It's usually very time-consuming, and you will need to learn new skills and tools.

That is: you have to encounter a problem that is a blocker, so that your motivation is that you have to solve the problem.

My experience was a long time ago: I had linked a library compiled with Borland C with code compiled with Microsoft C. It wouldn't work. I wss only using one function from the Borland library; that's where the error was occurring. It turned out that the Microsoft compiler required the callee to restore the flag register; the Borland compiler required the caller to do that. Therefore the carry bit wasn't being restored correctly, causing the bug. Took several days to figure out.