Comment by stinos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stinos | Hacker News Reader

Unless you’ve written a buggy program, you don’t realize that you’re addressing our intellect. This is why I think that every engineer on the planet looks at a bug report and feels a twinge of pain as they read whatever detail that was left to serve as a figurative shame sticker on the report card of their creation. It really sucks when you’re just flat out wrong.

Being wrong — rather, being incorrect — is an extremely humbling experience. The catastrophically incorrect, which is when software crashes, money is lost, or the absolute worst, data is stolen, is the kind of thing that makes you question your career choice. It makes you want to curl up into a ball and weep at how completely fucking stupid you were when you’ve found the problem.

Just had to quote this - I urge people who stopped reading or down't want to read the article to read this anyway. I've read a lot on developping but I think it's the first time I saw someone putting it like this. And oh boy, is he right. At least for me. Every bug report (well, the ones which points to something I obviously fucked up) hurts. What hurts even more is the dreaded reopened because I fucked up again. Especially because sometimes that means the whole set of classes surrounding the bug are just textbook examples of all code smells in the universe. And the only thing that can be done about it is the nearly impossible write good code 100% of the time.

I have a slightly different take. That used to be my initial reaction and it probably still is but taking a cue from other engineers better than me they seemed to internalize that there will be bugs, period. So might was well get over it and just fix them as they're found rather than get upset over them.

Of course they try to write good code, follow good practices, write tests etc but there's just going to be bugs, period. So don't beat yourself up. Just fix the bug, learn whatever you can from it so hopefully you won't do it again and or if it calls for it adjust your build infrastructure or testing infrastructure so you're more likely to catch them in the future.

"Just fix the bug, learn whatever you can from it so hopefully you won't do it again"

The baggage associated with bugs is so prevalent that we can't talk about them without a real sense of shame. "Hopefully you won't do it again".

Bugs are just part of the cycle. I completely agree with your assessment that people who can realize that are happier and more productive because they can plan for the probable case.

Same take, different personalities? I know and have known for a long time (in fact that was a small epiphany back then:) there will always be bugs no matter how much better I'll be in the future. And I do learn from them and fix them as they come by. But unfortunately that does not, and likely will never, stop me from feeling somewhat bad/stupid about creating one. Maybe I make it sound worse than it is though - it's not like bugs affect me more than is healthy or keep me up at night. After all: in the end the bug is fixed anyway so nothing to worry about anymore :P

I feel no pain when I see a bug report I just look at the bug and the reason why the bug occurred and then attempt to correct that in the future.

Bugs in a tracker don't hurt, bugs not in a tracker hurt.

People often forget that 'being wrong' feels exactly like 'being right.' What is humbling and embarrassing is learning that you were wrong before. When you are making a mistake, it usually doesn't feel like a mistake.

So it really is safe to assume that everything you do is wrong. It is nearly impossible to tell the difference between right and wrong when you take action. And wrong is so much more likely than right.

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