[ZaoLahma]

> 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]

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

[ZaoLahma]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Sounds like some great stories.

[int_19h]

The worst bug in my career was when the app would reliably crash if you left it running for "long enough" - but still non-probabilistically, so sometimes it would happen in an hour, sometimes in three. The crash itself was quickly diagnosed as a corrupt vtable, but finding the piece of code that had a pointer bug in it that just happened to write into (some) object's vtable in certain situations that triggered a race condition took many days.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

The reward for good work, is more work.

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

All bugs are mine.

[sfink]

What kind of kitchen are you working in where bugs are a concern??!

[bagacrap]

You must work on very simple codebases

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Yes and no.

I tend to work alone, so my scope is limited.

Some of the stuff I work on is quite involved, anyway.

I’ve been at this game awhile (coding for over 40 years), so I have learned a few tricks.

Of course, I “cheat.” I’ve learned to write software that doesn’t tend to have that many bugs, and I also don’t have to deal with other people’s code, so much. I write code for myself, which means that I don’t get to practice my debugging, so much, these days.

You can see for yourself. Much of my work is open-source, or source-available: https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY