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Dominic Burford wrote: How to debug / diagnose a problem.
Trust me, this is not limited to junior developers.
Dominic Burford wrote: I remember when doing my own degree (many years ago) we were taught these basic skills (using a Borland C++ IDE).
I do not remember anything like that, but given it's been just 5 years since I got out of the university, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a trend some time ago.
I struggled with this for a while when I had just started, but now I feel comfortable enough to be in your position.
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When I was at uni, you added punch cards to say
PRINT *, 'The value of I is ", i Assuming you had enough runs left: Our score for an assignment decreased by 10% for each run over three. 
When I moved into the "real world" and started working with embedded Z80 assembler, I had to write my own debugger to stop the process and display register / memory data in real time ...
Visual Studio has so many tools to make beginners life easier, and many of them have no idea that they even exist, much less that "debugging" is different from "fixing the compilation errors".
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Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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That's my favorite : "well, it compiles. Why doesn't run right?"
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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It seems that problem solving at all is not a skill taught to anyone anywhere...
Actually - 'you have a problem' is considered rude to tell a student, as it implies the need to take responsibility, which totally uncommon these days (and to force it on someone is unforgivable)...
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter wrote: It seems that problem solving at all is not a skill taught to anyone anywhere..
Agreed.
And even more broadly, critical thinking skills simply aren't taught.
That's the nature of schooling being based upon multiple choice and t/f exams.
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raddevus wrote: critical thinking skills simply aren't taught
You are wrong. I was taught to contradict everybody!
"If we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're going"
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megaadam wrote: I was taught to contradict everybody!
Here's your motto: I disagree, therefore I am! 
One always needs a sense of porpoise.
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I wasn't taught anything related to debugging when I was at University. In fact, when I got my first job I had support tickets with the customer claiming something was happening. I fell into the trap of asking my team leader "X says this is happening, can you think of a reason why?"
It was only after being constantly told "Can you reproduce it? If so, have you debugged it to see why it's happening? If not, then we obviously need more information" that I really fully embraced debugging. It seems silly, but up until then I'd only worked on personal projects which were less complex and the bugs were self-explanatory so I only debugged rarely.
If they don't teach it in College/University then I don't have a problem with senior developers teaching more junior developers the values. We have a few developers at my current place who, while being really adept and forward-thinking, sometimes forget to debug and inspect. A gentle nudge every now and then gets them back on track.
But you're right, while there's plenty of material on building code taught at Uni, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of properly debugging and diagnosing code. And I don't think anything prepares students for those situations where a client or customer has made something up!
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making stupid and glaring mistakes isn't taught either - but they're damn good at that.
so why the difference?
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I don't think that lack of debugging knowledge is the issue, so much as an inability even to understand what steps to take in problem analysis. Look at some of the questions here and you can see that some so called developers do not really understand the code they may even have written themselves. I suspect there are far too many people following a career into IT because they think it pays well, rather than because they have an interest in problem analysis and finding solutions.
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Richard MacCutchan wrote: I suspect there are far too many people following a career into IT because they think it pays well, rather than because they have an interest in problem analysis and finding solutions.
I would tend to agree. Many people coming into IT are career professionals rather than following a true passion for the industry.
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." - C.A.R. Hoare
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This is true for many careers. Many mechanics can't find problems in cars because they don't know how they work, they simply follow the company's instructions. So do many electricians.
If you know how the thing you made works, you also know where and what to look at to discover problems. If you don't, i.e. you copy-pasted code without minimal knowledge, you can know every single debugger function and still be useless as a bike to a fish.
GCS d--(d+) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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den2k88 wrote: be useless as a bike to a fish.
Well...[^]
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Agreed. There is a big difference between being able to use debugging tools and being able to do problem solving.
Kinda like the super intelligent person who lacks common sense.
A course in OR (Operations Research) could help. Working with real time systems will really test those skills. 
If you can keep your head while those about you are losing theirs, perhaps you don't understand the situation.
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"If you hear hooves, think of horses not zebras" is another of my favourites. Had one guy at a place I used to work always assumed every database issue was due to faults in the NAT firmware in the routers or maybe the network cards were dropping packets so needed updating. He'd spend his time researching new drivers etc etc, and when he still couldn't get it working I would take a look and nine times out of ten he had misspelled the server name in the connection string, or omitted the instance name or something like that.
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I found that so .. straight-forward that I could not have imagined it is something that needs to be taught.
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Me too, I only tend to debug my own code these days, the single step function is the one I use the most...
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It's worse than that. The code the junior devs write is often so algorithmically and/or architecturally wrong that debugging won't actually solve the problem. Abstracting the problem, breaking the problem down into smaller problem sets, asserting on inputs, writing try-catch handlers, none of this taught. As a result, debugging something that is broken from the get-go is pointless.
And debugging existing code that hopefully someone with more experience wrote? Forget it. Simple syntax like null continuation, generics, lambda functions, LINQ, callbacks...it's all Greek to them because they were never exposed to real programming.
The mantra my mentee kept repeating over and over again was "oh my god, why didn't they teach us that in school???" 
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Marc Clifton wrote: And debugging existing code that hopefully someone with more experience wrote? Forget it. Simple syntax like null continuation, generics, lambda functions, LINQ, callbacks...it's all Greek to them because they were never exposed to real programming.
I have to regularly explain how the code works at both the architectural level, as well as the code level. This is to get them to understand the underpinning design decisions, as well as the detail of how the code itself works. Generics and LINQ were completely brand new to them. It took several sessions to get them to understand the problem that Generics solves, nevermind understanding the syntax behind it.
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." - C.A.R. Hoare
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or u could just hire guys who know how to debug ..
Caveat Emptor.
"Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long
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I had to learn debugging / fault finding the hard way working in a support department. Not fun, but I learned a lot!
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May I direct your attention to QA and the programming forums where you can easily evaluate for yourself if debugging skills are being taught or not.
In my humble opine, the answer to that is "#$@% NO".
Tell someone to use the debugger to see the values the code is using and they react like you've slapped them with a fish. They're not sure how to respond, either with being insulted or afraid of the debugger like it's some form of dark magic they're afraid to mess with.
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From my college experience around 20 years ago, debugging was not taught, or maybe it was skimmed over enough that I never learned. At that time it was VS6 and I remember being amazed when I learned about breakpoints and F8 at my first job! 
As for problem solving, college was pretty weak there also. Assignments were mostly based on identical scenarios covered in the chapter...change a few variable names and get an A. There just wasn't much that required thinking outside the box.
That said, I also remember having to get creative to debug classic asp and javascript. The IDEs, languages and browsers have made web development so much easier than it used to be 20 years ago at least in terms of being able to debug. My 2 cents. 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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From my article - Being a Programmer[^]
8) If you're writing code using Visual Studio, learn how to use the built-in debugger. In fact, don't settle for being a "decent" debugger. Strive to be a GREAT debugger, because that's probably where you'll spend 75% of your coding time - tracking down and fixing issues cause by not only yourself, but by others as well. Exercise due caution while debugging someone else's code. Be diligent, and explore all possible side effects that might be caused by fixing an issue. If your shop is truly SDLC-compliant, the testers will regression test a new release candidate, but you should not count on the tests being able to capture every little nuance. (Unit tests are only as thorough as the person writing them.)
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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