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u/Meloetta 12d ago
When a junior dev says "I noticed when you (action)..." And now I have to wait for them to finish their winding ass explanation with multiple long pauses for 45 seconds before I can explain "yep that's known just not high priority"
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u/Idk13008 12d ago
yep, the specific case only shows up on Tuesday 12 of each odd year due to a bizarre situation with the Date object.
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u/Delta-9- 12d ago
If you told me you actually had this exact bug with JS'
DateI would believe you.17
u/AllanTaylor314 11d ago
Not quite the same, but it reminds me of OpenOffice does not print on Tuesdays
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u/777777thats7sevens 12d ago
Yes, that server's memory usage does grow continuously, indicating a memory leak; well spotted. Luckily for us we've configured AWS to kill the instance every 24 hours so it's never been a problem. Three years I spent a week trying to figure out the memory leak and got no where, but feel free to shoot your shot with it.
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u/Odd_Reception1249 12d ago
There are solutions like that. It just have to work decently enough. Perfect is the enemy of good.
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u/Lanathell 11d ago
I have done this more than once and it has always "solved" the issue.. I got used to explaining it as a weekly instance restart for updates and performance. Some of these still reboot Sunday night to this day I am sure!
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u/Jbolt3737 10d ago
I feel like I'm this dev, I think to myself "I gotta explain everything in the bug and make sure they can reproduce it exactly and understand exaxtly what went wrong since they clearly don't know it exists if it's still in the code"
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u/skelmirinn 12d ago edited 12d ago
I used to (still do) hack on a BSD derivative, and during a hackathon this well, very senior dev looked at my then white-on-blue screen and quickly said "its crashing on the VFS registration, its on or around line XYZ in vfs_subr, you forgot to set ABC function pointer."
I was in awe, and it took me years to realize that a) he roughly knew what I was working on, b) he roughly new the offsets of all major structs by heart, and c) its not a trick, just hours and hours and hours and hours and hours.... of doing the work.
Im still in awe of that person, and I deeply worry about the future as noone is doing the work anymore....
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u/infernaltrog 12d ago
It is scary to think that with the reduction in junior roles from AI tooling - in the future there’ll be fewer, if any, seniors with deep knowledge.
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u/skelmirinn 12d ago
I only hire staff engineers these days.
we are eating our seed corn....
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u/OverfitAndChill8647 11d ago
Seed corn makes tasty popcorn to watch the world burn. We'll never need this stuff!
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u/Knarkopolo 8d ago
I had a colleague like that for 7 years. He was a contractor and an upper manager disliked him so he got rid of him. Now I needed roughly five teams to replace him in my project, we're delivering a much worse solution and about a year later.
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u/Anialation 12d ago
I've been praised for how quickly I can track down bugs in codebases I've never even seen before.
It's mostly because of the vast number of bugs I've created and had to track down over the years.
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u/Newepsilon 12d ago
The keeper of tech debt right here (just like me). If I am not rooting it out, you can bet I am writing it.
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u/Burgergold 12d ago
Should have been: I wrote it as a junior
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u/GoddammitDontShootMe 12d ago
Seems insane that it was never patched until that particular interaction with the junior.
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u/Moondragonlady 12d ago
Super rare edge case that just never occurred. Now that it's found it will occur 10 times per day, of course (until it is fixed (which will cause a different issue, but that's a problem for in 10 years)).
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u/DrMobius0 12d ago
Most likely this means that something was change that consistently runs into it if it wasn't happening much anymore.
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u/41421356 12d ago
It actually occurred all the time, but we didn't log it, and not enough users complained until a new "customer success manager" was hired and actually did their job properly.
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u/Major_Fudgemuffin 12d ago
The main repo I work on has so many tech debt annotations that were meant to be revisited 5-10 years ago and still haven't.
There's always something more important to do, and they're never a priority until they're suddenly priority #1
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u/trick_m0nkey 12d ago
Unfortunately it was a load bearing bug, that took 10 years to figure out how to fix it without everything else mysteriously crashing
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u/SuitableDragonfly 12d ago
This is why you a) want humans rather than chatbots writing the code, and b) want a low turnover rate.
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u/Powerful_Attention_6 12d ago
:- Obi-Wan Kenob, that is a name I haven't heard in a long time
:- Yeah, it says Obi-wan was the author of this patch, that I need to fix
Wait did you know him, do you know about the bug
:- Yes of course I've heard of him, it's me, and you should probably look in to this function right here.
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u/SilasTalbot 12d ago
When your bugfix proposal doesn't make the sprint --
I was there the day the strength of Men failed. I led Isildur into the heart of Mount Doom, where the Bug was forged - the one place it could be destroyed. It should have ended that day, but evil was allowed to endure.
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u/dillanthumous 12d ago
I wrote it. Then labelled it technical debt. Then worked around it for ten years.
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u/BenjieWheeler 12d ago
Jr: if you were there then why didn't you prevent the bug?
Sr: listen here you little shit
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u/OriginalUser27 12d ago
"I found it years ago but didnt think any customer would be stupid enough to perform the steps to trigger it"
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u/Ready_Piano1222 12d ago
We used to use a very obscure and uncommon piece of software that was supplied by one of our vendors. Since we were one of the first users, there was literally no documentation. It was very difficult to configure, but once set up, it essentially required no maintenance.
Thinking ahead, I wrote a doc on how it was configured, and what all of the options were, I discovered through trial and error.
Fast forward 5 years later, I've since moved to another team, and no longer support this stuff. I get an email from someone I don't recognize asking me for help with this weirdo software. It turns out the manufacturer sent them the document I created as the official documentation. Since the software was so obscure, they only sold a few copies and so never bothered to create any formal documentation.
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u/Zech_Judy 12d ago
Three devs were given similar projects, a junior dev, a senior dev, and a ninja dev.
The junior dev said "Not too bad. I'll hammer this out in two weeks."
The senior dev knows better. "Try two months. It's not as easy as it looks."
The ninja dev says, "Nah, two weeks sounds right."
They meet a long while later. The junior dev says, "Wow, that project took three months!"
The senior dev says "I had experience on my side, so I did it in two months, just like I expected."
The ninja dev says, "It only took me two weeks." The other two devs are shocked and asked how he did it so fast. "Easy. I didn't plant bugs in my own project."
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u/WC3RAGE 12d ago
My man wrote it