Debugging My Own Code Is A Sin
Anonymous Cheeky Wallflower #823 · General
I am a software engineer and I have this weird habit that drives my colleagues crazy. Whenever we encounter bugs in our code, whether it's mine or someone else’s, instead of fixing the bug directly, I always spend at least an hour trying to figure out how exactly the system got into that state before addressing the fix. It’s like I need to understand every single line and variable change leading up to the issue before I can press a button to solve it. For instance, last week we had an urgent bug that was crashing our server during high traffic times. Everyone was stressing out because this was affecting customer satisfaction scores. My team lead told me to jump straight into fixing it so we could restore service and figure out the details later. But I insisted on debugging from when the error first occurred a week ago until now. I know my approach is time-consuming, but the idea of just fixing bugs without understanding them thoroughly feels like... cheating? Like I'm not really solving anything if I don't understand why it happened in the first place. Is this how everyone else thinks about problem-solving or am I the only one who needs to overanalyze every detail before moving forward? My colleagues sometimes call me a perfectionist, but honestly, I’m just trying to be thorough. But when emergencies strike, my method doesn't seem very helpful at all. Am I really being an asshole for this? Is there something wrong with wanting everything to make sense first?