Founder's Desk
Bug fixing, or debugging, is one of the least favourite activities of both software engineers and engineering managers. For the engineer, it interrupts planned work and carries urgency and stress. Diagnosing software issues well means combining medical-style symptom analysis with crash-investigation-style reliance on logs, not random guesswork.
Why debugging feels like guesswork
Bug fixing is one of the least enjoyable activities for both engineers and managers. For the engineer, it interrupts planned work, offers little of the satisfaction of building something new, and usually carries an element of urgency that adds stress on top of the interruption. For the manager, it's hard to estimate, hard to prioritize against feature work, and easy to under-resource.
A large part of what makes debugging frustrating, though, isn't the bug itself. It's a process that relies on guesswork or defensive fixes rather than a genuine, repeatable method for finding the actual cause.
Medical diagnosis works from visible symptoms, forming a hypothesis, then running a test that would confirm or rule it out. Air crash investigation works differently: it leans heavily on logs, the flight data recorder, the black box, because symptoms alone rarely tell the full story of a complex system failure.
Most production bugs need some blend of both. Symptoms point you toward a plausible hypothesis, but logs, traces, and monitoring are what actually confirm or kill that hypothesis. Engineers who skip the logs and go straight from symptom to fix are essentially doing medicine without ever ordering a test.
Guessing dressed up as fixing
As a manager, the highest-leverage thing you can do isn't personally debugging alongside your team. It's making sure the logging, tracing, and monitoring exist before the bug shows up, since good diagnostic infrastructure turns a stressful guessing exercise into a comparatively calm process of checking hypotheses against evidence.
The manager's real job during a bug hunt
A defensive fix patches the symptom the user reported without confirming the actual mechanism behind it. It often "works" in the sense that the specific reported case stops happening, while the underlying bug quietly persists and resurfaces later in a slightly different shape, sometimes making it harder to trace the second time because the obvious symptom has changed.
The tell is a fix nobody can explain in terms of cause and effect. If the answer to "why does this fix work" is a shrug, it's very likely a defensive fix rather than a real one.
The question to ask before the fix starts
Next time a bug report comes in, ask your team one question before they start: "what evidence would confirm or rule out your leading hypothesis, and do we already have it?" If the answer is no, that's usually the first thing worth fixing.
