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Content catalinmpit catalinmpit My day as a dev G 0. Something is wrong 1. Investigation phase 2. No way I can fix this 3. Imposter syndrome kicks in 4. Questions career choice 5. Questions life choices 6. Oh, never mind! I made a typo in the code 7. 1 fixed it 8. I am a good developer 9. I can do anything

Content Coding Chair anda seal Debugging Chair

Content me trying to find the bug working code the actualbug

Content Finding a bug Let's reproduce Finding a spouse

Content I've interviewed a lot of people over the last year (Java), and my favorite test is to throw a Stack Trace at them and ask them to figure out what the problem is. The answer is actually quite clear, however. Half of them don't know it's called a stack trace. Some don't know what they're looking at (BYE!). Several focus on the wrong section of proprietary code. Some ask to "open a debugger". however the answer is right there in plain english if you just read the method names. Many don't realize the line numbers are RIGHT THERE, and then start focusing on the lines ending with "Compiled Code". Then there are the ones who work their way up from the bottom, starting with the application container code, and lose their minds. Some who figure out what is happening don't have a solution to prevent it from happening. No, I'm not sharing the trace; suffice to say it's been reviewed by more than 5 of my peers and they all passed. Like Reply 1h Edited I mean, it isn't hard to eliminate people with a coding question. Do you find it impossible to teach people how to read text stack traces, or is this a skill without which they will be unable to do anything of use, or do you just not want to hire anyone? 1 am serious. 1 can come up with dozens of useful programming skills I can test a candidate on that most perfectly skilled programmers would fail. Start with eliminating people who can't code at all. Then find out what they can do that could be useful. If I have 5 people who can already take a printed out stack crash dump, I probably don't need another, and if I do, a qualified candidate can be taught that skill by someone who knows it in under a week. Then again, maybe you work for Stack Trace Inc, and your entire job is looking at stack traces. If so, by bad. Like Reply 22m

When the Senior Dev asks how you fixed that critical bug and all you did was add // TODO: Fix this later and somehow it works now... The look of absolute horror on Tom's face is the perfect representation of senior developers everywhere realizing their codebase is held together by digital duct tape and wishful thinking. Meanwhile, Jerry the intern is just happy the red squiggly lines disappeared from his IDE. The greatest mystery in software development isn't why the bug appeared—it's why it vanished after you acknowledged its existence in a comment. It's like the bug got embarrassed and decided to hide.