[blatherard]

This reminds me of more than one job interview I've had. One included a puzzler that was "fix this horribly convoluted javascript code by adding exactly four characters." I'd consider myself a pretty good bug finder-and-fixer. As in, I've read multiple books on debugging methods and even given some talks on effective debugging. Nevertheless, these kinds of stumpers make me freeze up.

I dunno exactly what puzzles like these demonstrate. That you spend a lot of time working in poorly written code?

[Too]

I've actually seen this mentality on production code. "The smaller the diff the better. And The less we change the less likely we are to introduce new bugs!!1".

[jrochkind1]

If you don't have tests, it's probably true.