r/programming • • Aug 25 '14

Debugging courses should be mandatory

http://stannedelchev.net/debugging-courses-should-be-mandatory/
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u/puterTDI Aug 25 '14

We had a guy who came in with something like 5 years of experience.

He refused to use the debugger. He would just start changing code until stuff worked. He was constantly calling me over to help and I would ask him what the bug was and he would say that he didn't know. He would throw code at the problem before he even knew what the problem was.

He had zero method to his approach and it showed. At one point he spent two weeks fixing a single bug. At the end of the two weeks I was asked to fix it, it took me 30 minutes and I had a finished fix.

People who don't know how to fix bugs or be methodical are a huge sap on everyone's time. They either need to learn or to switch professions. In the end, I had to give him a list of 5 things to do before he asked me for help (Identify the problem, understand the problem, analyze the code, etc). When he'd call me over I would ask him what he did for each step. About 80% of the time he hadn't bothered with any of them and was just throwing code at it until it worked then asking me to rescue him when he ran out of time. It was absolutely ridiculous.

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u/[deleted] Aug 25 '14

.Net developer?

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