Programmers should be, and indeed have to be, fundamentally lazy, to be any good. My entire goal in life is, and always has been, to get the shit that other pe

Programmers should be, and indeed have to be, fundamentally lazy, to be any good. My entire goal in life is, and always has been, to get the shit that other people shovel onto my plate done as quickly and efficiently as I can, so I can get back to the much more interesting things that I'd rather be doing. A good programmer will go to great lengths to avoid doing time-consuming tedious bullshit. With regards to fixing bullshit transient bugs in other people's software: usually understanding the full root cause does not matter. It's going to update, and bring forth a whole new suite of bugs and oddities in short order. Your machine is a weird, ungovernable collection of state that cannot be fully understood and rarely presents the same way twice. If I had a dollar for every time I followed the definition of insanity and did the same thing over and over to get different results, I wouldn't need to work anymore. But when you have found a StackOverflow post that ends up working to fix some whack-a-mole stupid thing, it's not like you move on and that knowledge goes poof into the aether. You might forget some details of what it was, but the next time something along those lines comes up, there will at least be the trace of a memory of what fixed it the last time. Over time, you build up this pattern matching apparatus, and in a couple years you can look at a bizarre nested exception trace generated from deep inside some Javabean hell, and you know that, "Oh, something is wonky with DNS on this machine" or whatever. It looks like magic from the outside, but it is utterly mundane.