so, an employee at a high-valued company posted an issue for a project I follow and I'm not going to say who or what because I don't think it's right to call them out explicitly. you can probably figure it out if you really care

but, the experience reminded me of my time as a tutor at university, when I encountered some truly bonkers (imho) situations where people just… didn't understand how to debug their own problems

like one person had typed out all of the code for a C program that was supposed to print some text art for a programming assignment, and asked me if I thought it would work

"did you run it?"

"no, I just want to know if this is a good approach"

like… we don't run on punch cards any more. CPU time isn't something you have to squeeze out in the evenings when no one else is using the mainframe. you can just run your own code. I give you permission

so, it's funny to see someone talking about an incredibly weird bug in an incredibly specific situation and saying… this code doesn't work. like, I probed them a bit since it is an embedded scenario and debugging in these kinds of cases is difficult, but then they said that they knew the allocator was fine because they could log the address from that.

you… can log… things. okay. so, do that? you're commenting in the place where the code is, and you have the power to just, run the code and add in debug-logging to figure out what's breaking.

and it's funny how I see these parallels between people who first learned programming like, a month ago, and people who get paid to program by large companies

@clarfonthey At one point, various tech companies were bragging about how they hired the best graduates of top schools right out of school, with the implication that they must have the most competent people, and every time I see a post like this, I think back to that