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> Realizing that I spend more time troubleshooting than I do building or doing ... That's not good. The problem with troubleshooting is that it messes up with

> Realizing that I spend more time troubleshooting than I do building or doing ... That's not good. The problem with troubleshooting is that it messes up with your reward system. After you fix a hard-to-debug problem, you feel a sense of accomplishment. Which would be ok, but the problem is that this sense of accomplishment is often time higher than it should be. You go home at the end of the day thinking "well, today I didn't build anything, but it's fine, because I fixed that bug". You are becoming complacent. If you end up saying to yourself, like the author of this blog here, that you troubleshoot more than you build or you do, then you have a problem. Soon you'll be seen by others as a car mechanic. Maybe a reliable car mechanic. But reliable car mechanics don't get paid a lot. This might be a controversial take but here it is: being proud of your troubleshooting skills sits somewhere between being proud of your typing speed and being proud of your word document formatting skills. These things never go obsolete, but don't fool yourself into thinking they are gold currency on the job market.

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xerox13ster 2y ago
This mentality through most of my career has left me trapped as technical support, and it's damn near impossible to climb out of the pit I've dug for myself. What you say about being seen as a car mechanic is true.
- foo_barrio 2y ago
  This played out at my last place. My boss would assign my co-worker to build the world's crappiest car in the least amount of time and when it broke down I would be the only one that seemed to be able to fix it (while my co-worker was busy building some other crappy car). I would have built a much better car in the first place! However I would have taken more time and the goal was to build and release as fast a possible. My boss was okay with the risk of said crappy car, my co-worker got promoted and I slowly burned out. It's a tough balancing to make sure you sell yourself correctly and fight to work on things you want to!
  - steveBK123 2y ago
    We had a guy like this on our team once, it took a year to convince management he was a net drag on the team. Half the team quit, the other half said they would if they had to work with him any longer. To prove the point we put him on a strategic rewrite and gave him master/trunk while the entire team moved to a feature branch for 6 months. This was complimentary to his ego as he was sick of us bureaucrats in the rest of the team telling him what to do and being such a burden on his genius creativity. By the end he was unable to build / run his own branch, while the remaining team lost no velocity and was making regular releases to end users. The choice was easy at that point.
- rokhayakebe 2y ago
  Until you start your own company, even if it is just you.
- fjjjrjj 2y ago
  I feel this way about documentation. I do it, a lot. I get compliments and positive feedback on it. It helps me remember things I would otherwise forget. I hope that others would be inspired by my example but it hasn't happened. I could be selfish and horde my own documentation and let others sink or swim. But that hurts me too as I'd have to pick up their slack.
  - MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
    I'm reminded of the Gervais Principle. Doing the work is not the way to "win," but not winning might be the better lifestyle. Depends on your motivations, aspirations, and ethics. It's easy to chase the total compensation number, because it's just _there_ and like what are we doing anyway? But then what are you doing, anyway?
    - fjjjrjj 2y ago
      That's been my career mindset. I've been in roles where my management has referred to me as a "rockstar" and it was a burden not a compliment. I'd rather be in a supportive team environment where everyone carries their own weight. Compensation has been decent with this approach over the years. I could have made more staying longer in a darwinian bigco but the work was not fulfilling.
- ForTheKidz 2y ago
  > and it's damn near impossible to climb out of the pit I've dug for myself. By far the easiest way to do so will be to find another job. If you can't do this, yea, mentality will lock you in to positions you don't want to be in.
  - pasc1878 2y ago
    The problem is that the new employer looks for CVs of those who achieve flashy things not those who fix things. Fixing things only gets notices by coworkers and good managers.
    - ForTheKidz 2y ago
      Agreed that could be a problem. Seems like a benefit in disguise, though—such an employer is likely not to manage a product well.
pinkmuffinere 2y ago
And it isn’t just your _appearance_ or _pay_ you should be worrying about. If you fix a nitpicky bug that affected 5% of the users — congrats that’s a pretty big bug! But could you have built a new feature that would roll out to 50% of users in that same time? In many situations, building the new feature will have a bigger impact on the world than the bug fix. Obviously will depend on the exact circumstance. But you should consider the opportunity cost.
- Cpoll 2y ago
  > But could you have built a new feature that would roll out to 50% of users in that same time? No.
  - pinkmuffinere 2y ago
    If the impact of debugging is expected to be larger than building something new, then debug. Else, build something new.
    - LeifCarrotson 2y ago
      The problem is that the real impact and the perceived value of each path are not necessarily the same. Building new things is sexy and highly visible. It's easy to say about yourself "I built that cool new feature" or better, to promote "I might build something of incredible value". You're front-and-center with decision makers, shaping the future. Conversely, debugging is perceived as a cost center. "I fixed that critical infrastructure that used to work with only minor interruption" or "Maybe everything will break and you'll need me to fix it" are not nearly as exciting. Worse, the best maintenance is completely invisible, fixing problems before they are felt. You're in the background, dealing with the legacy of the past.
      - esafak 2y ago
        If your organization is like that then let them know. Suggest some leading indicators that they could track so you can take credit for your preventative work. If all else fails, then you can decide if you want to just do visible work or leave.
sjsdaiuasgdia 2y ago
I think you may be leaning too far in the other direction. I'm a troubleshooter. I fix problems. I keep my head straight in a crisis. Every job I've had across 3 decades, regardless of my actual title or formal responsibilities, I'm the firefighter. People call me when they can't figure something out. People call me when something big breaks and needs to be fixed urgently. Even if I'm not an expert in the broken thing, they call me in. They call me because the experts are often floundering and not making any progress because they can't troubleshoot their way out of a wet paper bag. I do not feel this has held me back professionally. I have been loved by management and peers in all of these jobs. When I nearly left a prior employer because much of the work wasn't aligned with what I wanted to do, management created a new role with better aligned work and higher pay to convince me to stay. In my current role, I'm very happy with my salary, working environment, management, and team. I wish troubleshooting skills were as common as typing and document formatting skills. I wouldn't need to help out nearly as many people because they could handle their own crises.
- rokhayakebe 2y ago
  In fact you could easily be the guy they keep on a monthly retainer just for peace of mind.
  - lurk2 2y ago
    The word retainer has an appealing mercenary quality to it. The dream is that your knowledge of an esoteric system set up in the 1980s gets you warehoused in a data closet at a mid-sized organization, where you can spend the rest of your days browsing Hacker News and watching pirated films.
    - K0balt 2y ago
      After 3 years the finish gets dull, but it’s still not bad. Not the worst contract I ever worked.
- dblohm7 2y ago
  > I do not feel this has held me back professionally. I have been loved by management and peers in all of these jobs. If only your experience was universal in that regard! I once had that role in an early-career job -- but I was looked down upon by peers and management because I was doing mostly maintenance work. The "good" developers, in their minds, were the ones shipping the most new features -- the irony being that those features would then blow up out in the field, at which time they landed on my desk to turn them into production-worthy code.
pryelluw 2y ago
Funny. Sounds like you’re troubleshooting their reward system.
theshackleford 2y ago
> don't fool yourself into thinking they are gold currency on the job market. I must have gotten lucky then because I’ve built most of my career off my incredible troubleshooting capacity and my communication capability. I’m not earning Silicon Valley money (because thankfully I don’t live there) but I’m at the top end for salaries in my country. I out earn the vast majority of devs/devops people I know. Maybe it’s a bit unfair though because I troubleshoot at a very different level to most I suspect. edit Or maybe I’ve been applying the wrong word to what I do my entire career…or misunderstanding why I’m valued. This is more possible than it might seem. edit For further context, i've held a wide variety of positions now within IT, including executive management. The problem is still, and I know this will sound stupid, I don't know how it is I got here, or why people valued me enough to keep me promoting me. I never even asked for the promotions they just...happened. This has made applying for new jobs harder, because I've never actually been entirely sure what my value is, so I often take jobs that are lower than my last job, but then everytime its not long before I end up well above that again. I eventually assumed it must be my troubleshooting capacity. I asked a CEO I worked with once at a smaller startup why it is he kept promoting me, and I got this story about how by just being in the room, everyone around me wants to do better work. Not because they are being told to do so, but because the work I do apparently just inspires people around me to do better. I was the truest example he had seen apparently of 'lead by example.' It's been very problematic because despite earning good money, and having never struggled to find, retain or advance in a job, I still don't truely know what it is exactly i'm good at. I think im terrible at explaining this. Every time I have tried to talk to someone about it in real life they just end up telling me I have impostor syndrome. Of course I do, I don't really know what the fuck it is I do.
jemmyw 2y ago
> But reliable car mechanics don't get paid a lot I dunno, the mechanic I go to is reliable and so busy it's hard to get a slot these days, and he seems to be doing very well for himself. So many mechanics are unreliable
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imglorp 2y ago
If you are debugging your work too much, maybe it's you. Obligatory Kernighan’s law: “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”
zem 2y ago
> Soon you'll be seen by others as a car mechanic. Maybe a reliable car mechanic. But reliable car mechanics don't get paid a lot. this argues for a messed up reward system for the company, not the engineer. all sufficiently large systems have bugs and performance issues, and adding a measure of reliability, stability, and speed is just as important as adding features.
fatbird 2y ago
My skill at troubleshooting has caused me to be the goto guy in every project, which lends great credibility and opportunities for leadership. Your pride in your troubleshooting skills isn't pride in a side-quest, it's pride in having a deep understanding of how systems work in general and in the specific. "Good troubleshooter" might not look great on a CV, but all of your coworkers naming you as the most valuable member of the team, and a natural leader, is worth more than any feature launches.
- linza 2y ago
  The value is in leadership, and being able to avoid certain classes of bugs from appearing in the first place. Troubleshooting just happens to be the skill that allows you to gain the knowledge to lead.
  - fatbird 2y ago
    Exactly: "I found the root cause and corrected it. It may be an issue in these other two places so we should check there as well." "Great. How do we avoid issues like this in the future?" "By doing X thing a different way, and ensuring that Y thing is also in place."
- tonyedgecombe 2y ago
  >My skill at troubleshooting has caused me to be the goto guy in every project I stopped trying to be that person because it came with too many costs. It wasn't that I didn't want to do it but that I wanted other people to be able to in my absence.
pklausler 2y ago
Some kinds of troubleshooting are pretty important, though (e.g., medicine).
linza 2y ago
It's even worse than that. Making troubleshooting skills a profession in itself makes reliability a property of a specific person or team and not a property of the system. The former doesn't scale.
- ConspiracyFact 2y ago
  You’ll never be able to build a (large, complex) system that is consistently, inherently reliable over time and in response to change. You want to aim for such reliability but you still need troubleshooting ability.
dylan604 2y ago
> But reliable car mechanics don't get paid a lot. If you're a wizbang mechanic working for an import car repair, you can get paid a lot more in hourly labor fees than some of us make.
- noisy_boy 2y ago
  They were talking about reliable, 10x is worth a lot in most complex jobs.
hooverd 2y ago
You get more credit for putting out fires you started than building something that doesn't catch on fire in the first place.
- tonyedgecombe 2y ago
  I remember a post here from someone who would leave deliberate problems in his otherwise reliable code then would swoop in and fix them when the customer discovered them. Apparently the customer loved him. Personally I've seen people who struggled on a trivial problem get a strong rating from their manager afterwards.
RockRobotRock 2y ago
I have found myself to be someone that loves learning a little bit about various tech disciplines, but I've ended up as a "master of none" because I get bored quickly. Any advice for a career path that would reward such a thing?
- esafak 2y ago
  CTO :)
dotancohen 2y ago
> reliable car mechanics don't get paid a lot. Actually, they do. It's the unreliable car mechanics that need to swindle.
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  Reliable mechanics have high rates and long waits everywhere I've lived. Hell, I've seen some that are so busy that they won't take new customers!
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    They also select reliable customers by their rates. People who will bring in their car on time, and pay the bill on time, and not feign outrage when you hand them the bill, and not try to nickel and dime you by providing their own parts or or asking you to do work based on their own diagnosis of the problem.
glitchc 2y ago
I'm not sure that I agree with this, not that I'm big on troubleshooting, but experienced SREs (Site Reliability Engineers) are worth their weight in gold and get paid an insane amount of money. Perhaps the key is to debug a vendor's solution rather than an in-house one.
willturman 2y ago
User credit_guy advocates for technical debt.
- credit_guy 2y ago
  Not at all. I do a lot of troubleshooting myself. Throughout my career (2 decades) I was very often the guy who did the troubleshooting. I still am, and I'm quite good at it. But I don't want to be known as the great troubleshooter in my team. I want to be known (and I am) as the guy who builds stuff.
Curiositry 2y ago
This is a fascinating take. I have been thinking about your comment for two days. I think you're right in some cases (when working in a field one has mastered, for example), and I think I could probably go in the direction of getting it right the first time. But the way I see it, any time I'm doing something new or innovative, I'm doing something I don't know how to do, which takes trial and error; and troubleshooting is basically figuring things out by trial and error, in a systematic way. Though a lot of time it is used for fixing bugs, I think troubleshooting as a skill and mindset is equally useful for creating new things, where you are solving for something.
- ge96 2y ago
  time dilation
  - Curiositry 2y ago
    Based on the timestamps, it could only be. But this story, timestamps notwithstanding, was submitted by suprisetalk ~2 days ago. Then it was placed in news.ycombinator.com/pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool?next=43176091 https://news.ycombinator.com/pool?next=43176091), and got two comments; credit_guy's comment was one of them. Then, today, it hit the frontpage. Notice that if you mouse over "9 hours ago" on the story it shows the timestamp 2025-02-25. 9 hours ago was not 2025-02-25. If you mouse over the "7 hours ago" on credit_guy's comment, the timestamp shows 2025-02-26. One day after it was submitted, two days before it made the frontpage.
heisenbit 2y ago
Troubleshooting skills are really valuable but hard to market. You can deal with lot's of different technologies and effortless draw conclusions from for others totally disconnected domains. Sadly the tech market values expertise that is based on keywords. So while it is fun and creates huge value it is worth staying mostly on a path that can be explained to less mentally flexible mortals.
Vegenoid 2y ago
> But reliable car mechanics don't get paid a lot. I honestly don't know: do they not? The reliable mechanics in my city seem to do tons of business and charge significantly higher prices than the competition. I can think of a lot of software that I have stopped paying for because they did not fix bugs or performance issues. I can think of far less software that I stopped paying for because although it was reliable, they did not add more features to it - but I am an individual, not a business, and likely am not representative of the average software-buying individual. In software and systems that I have built for myself, the impact of fixing a bothersome bug is usually far higher than adding a new capability, but I may just be more bothered by bugs than most. Reliability and smooth, predictable operation are very important to me.
0manrho 2y ago
> But reliable car mechanics don't get paid a lot. Not a great analogy. Reliable car mechanics often get paid very well in comparison to their peers. Used to be one. Got into tech as a result of how much tech got into cars. Do they pay as well as tech jobs? Depends. I made more money and worked less hours than my buddy in IT at one of the largest corporations in America in the same city (granted not a techhub like SV, Seattle, NYC, etc, but most places aren't). The key differentiator here is not time spent building vs time spent repairing (troubleshooting). It's knowing what's worth spending your time on, and when to say "No", because not everything needs fixed, nor is every problem necessarily yours to solve. Truly good diagnostics skills is knowing what's worth spending time on, regardless of whether it's repairing something that exists or building something that doesn't. A tire with only 10% of treadwear could technically be replaced with something better, but is that worth anyone's time or money? Probably not. But if the tire on the opposite side is still brand new, and they were replaced at the same time, diagnostics tells you the alignment is off, and that issue - whatever it may be - very well could be worth everyone's time and money to fix. Code is no different. Don't try to fix/improve/build everything. Focus on what matters. Good troubleshooting/diagnostic skills is a big part of knowing what does, and doesn't.
miguelazo 2y ago
There is some truth to what you’re saying, but that’s just another example of (particularly American) capitalism’s masterful misallocation of resources when it comes to compensation.
fredophile 2y ago
I spend way more time troubleshooting than I do building new things. I'm a lead programmer on my team. I regularly hop on impromptu zoom calls to help people out with thorny problems or jump into slack conversations. I don't get a lot of focused time for building new stuff. I'm more valuable to my team keeping them running smoothly and enforcing standards that avoid some of the nastier troubleshooting.
forgetfreeman 2y ago
This take seems pretty short-sighted. You may well have a point regarding what hiring managers actually value but speaking from experience having a couple people on hand that are better at solving problems than manufacturing them is pretty clutch in most settings where results are actually important.
brailsafe 2y ago
Reliable car mechanics with ambition actually get paid fairly well compared to actually complacent car mechanics. It's not staff software engineer money, but it's pretty decent, and a hell of a lot less of whichever qualities one associates with working in tech for better or worse. I don't think those qualities are mutually exclusive. But, much like everything, it goes without saying almost that generally you should have a variety of skills you can bring to the table.
mrayycombi 2y ago
Complacency is not just feeling good, but doing so while ignoring a risk. You can feel good about addressing risks, the opposite of complacency.
ForTheKidz 2y ago
> You are becoming complacent. I think that's just having a job. There's nothing inherently better about building than fixing. Hell, anyone can build something these days. You can get chatgpt to write you a fully functional bootloader without knowing a single bit of assembly or how booting operates. Being able to grasp and fix things is already the superlative talent worth hiring for. > But reliable car mechanics don't get paid a lot. The equivalent in our industry is worth a lot more money than someone who can only build. I think "building" is a lot closer to your analogy of using a word processor than "fixing" things is and you've got the reputation of the two skills completely swapped.
autonomousErwin 2y ago
I think I know what you mean, in an ideal world - we wouldn't have bugs. You'd build a feature and it would work forever but that's rarely the case. I think of it as "offensive" and "defensive" building, ideally you want to be on the offensive (i.e. building stuff that wasn't there yesterday) but you have to balance it with good defence (i.e. adding a certain type of anti-fragility to your system by fixing bugs due to your features being exposed to the real world). Saying this, I've never met a good engineer who wasn't very good at troubleshooting so perhaps it's more of a consequence of building than a skillset.
technofiend 2y ago
I agree the need for troubleshooting can be born from poor decisions, but it's still a marketable skill for places that need it at scale. One of my roles was head of Linux Engineering for a Fortune 50. Sure there's the pets vs cattle thing and we all prefer cattle, but particularly in places with lots of legacy apps and infrastructure there are plenty of both that need more nuance than turning it off and back on again. There's value in fixing things in the moment and then feeding them back to your engineer and architecture functions to address endemic issues so that everyone benefits.

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xerox13ster 2y ago

This mentality through most of my career has left me trapped as technical support, and it's damn near impossible to climb out of the pit I've dug for myself. What you say about being seen as a car mechanic is true.

foo_barrio 2y ago
This played out at my last place. My boss would assign my co-worker to build the world's crappiest car in the least amount of time and when it broke down I would be the only one that seemed to be able to fix it (while my co-worker was busy building some other crappy car). I would have built a much better car in the first place! However I would have taken more time and the goal was to build and release as fast a possible. My boss was okay with the risk of said crappy car, my co-worker got promoted and I slowly burned out. It's a tough balancing to make sure you sell yourself correctly and fight to work on things you want to!
- steveBK123 2y ago
  We had a guy like this on our team once, it took a year to convince management he was a net drag on the team. Half the team quit, the other half said they would if they had to work with him any longer. To prove the point we put him on a strategic rewrite and gave him master/trunk while the entire team moved to a feature branch for 6 months. This was complimentary to his ego as he was sick of us bureaucrats in the rest of the team telling him what to do and being such a burden on his genius creativity. By the end he was unable to build / run his own branch, while the remaining team lost no velocity and was making regular releases to end users. The choice was easy at that point.
rokhayakebe 2y ago
Until you start your own company, even if it is just you.
fjjjrjj 2y ago
I feel this way about documentation. I do it, a lot. I get compliments and positive feedback on it. It helps me remember things I would otherwise forget. I hope that others would be inspired by my example but it hasn't happened. I could be selfish and horde my own documentation and let others sink or swim. But that hurts me too as I'd have to pick up their slack.
- MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
  I'm reminded of the Gervais Principle. Doing the work is not the way to "win," but not winning might be the better lifestyle. Depends on your motivations, aspirations, and ethics. It's easy to chase the total compensation number, because it's just _there_ and like what are we doing anyway? But then what are you doing, anyway?
  - fjjjrjj 2y ago
    That's been my career mindset. I've been in roles where my management has referred to me as a "rockstar" and it was a burden not a compliment. I'd rather be in a supportive team environment where everyone carries their own weight. Compensation has been decent with this approach over the years. I could have made more staying longer in a darwinian bigco but the work was not fulfilling.
ForTheKidz 2y ago
> and it's damn near impossible to climb out of the pit I've dug for myself. By far the easiest way to do so will be to find another job. If you can't do this, yea, mentality will lock you in to positions you don't want to be in.
- pasc1878 2y ago
  The problem is that the new employer looks for CVs of those who achieve flashy things not those who fix things. Fixing things only gets notices by coworkers and good managers.
  - ForTheKidz 2y ago
    Agreed that could be a problem. Seems like a benefit in disguise, though—such an employer is likely not to manage a product well.

pinkmuffinere 2y ago

And it isn’t just your _appearance_ or _pay_ you should be worrying about. If you fix a nitpicky bug that affected 5% of the users — congrats that’s a pretty big bug! But could you have built a new feature that would roll out to 50% of users in that same time? In many situations, building the new feature will have a bigger impact on the world than the bug fix. Obviously will depend on the exact circumstance. But you should consider the opportunity cost.

Cpoll 2y ago
> But could you have built a new feature that would roll out to 50% of users in that same time? No.
- pinkmuffinere 2y ago
  If the impact of debugging is expected to be larger than building something new, then debug. Else, build something new.
  - LeifCarrotson 2y ago
    The problem is that the real impact and the perceived value of each path are not necessarily the same. Building new things is sexy and highly visible. It's easy to say about yourself "I built that cool new feature" or better, to promote "I might build something of incredible value". You're front-and-center with decision makers, shaping the future. Conversely, debugging is perceived as a cost center. "I fixed that critical infrastructure that used to work with only minor interruption" or "Maybe everything will break and you'll need me to fix it" are not nearly as exciting. Worse, the best maintenance is completely invisible, fixing problems before they are felt. You're in the background, dealing with the legacy of the past.
    - esafak 2y ago
      If your organization is like that then let them know. Suggest some leading indicators that they could track so you can take credit for your preventative work. If all else fails, then you can decide if you want to just do visible work or leave.

sjsdaiuasgdia 2y ago

I think you may be leaning too far in the other direction. I'm a troubleshooter. I fix problems. I keep my head straight in a crisis. Every job I've had across 3 decades, regardless of my actual title or formal responsibilities, I'm the firefighter. People call me when they can't figure something out. People call me when something big breaks and needs to be fixed urgently. Even if I'm not an expert in the broken thing, they call me in. They call me because the experts are often floundering and not making any progress because they can't troubleshoot their way out of a wet paper bag. I do not feel this has held me back professionally. I have been loved by management and peers in all of these jobs. When I nearly left a prior employer because much of the work wasn't aligned with what I wanted to do, management created a new role with better aligned work and higher pay to convince me to stay. In my current role, I'm very happy with my salary, working environment, management, and team. I wish troubleshooting skills were as common as typing and document formatting skills. I wouldn't need to help out nearly as many people because they could handle their own crises.

rokhayakebe 2y ago
In fact you could easily be the guy they keep on a monthly retainer just for peace of mind.
- lurk2 2y ago
  The word retainer has an appealing mercenary quality to it. The dream is that your knowledge of an esoteric system set up in the 1980s gets you warehoused in a data closet at a mid-sized organization, where you can spend the rest of your days browsing Hacker News and watching pirated films.
  - K0balt 2y ago
    After 3 years the finish gets dull, but it’s still not bad. Not the worst contract I ever worked.
dblohm7 2y ago
> I do not feel this has held me back professionally. I have been loved by management and peers in all of these jobs. If only your experience was universal in that regard! I once had that role in an early-career job -- but I was looked down upon by peers and management because I was doing mostly maintenance work. The "good" developers, in their minds, were the ones shipping the most new features -- the irony being that those features would then blow up out in the field, at which time they landed on my desk to turn them into production-worthy code.

pryelluw 2y ago

Funny. Sounds like you’re troubleshooting their reward system.

theshackleford 2y ago

> don't fool yourself into thinking they are gold currency on the job market. I must have gotten lucky then because I’ve built most of my career off my incredible troubleshooting capacity and my communication capability. I’m not earning Silicon Valley money (because thankfully I don’t live there) but I’m at the top end for salaries in my country. I out earn the vast majority of devs/devops people I know. Maybe it’s a bit unfair though because I troubleshoot at a very different level to most I suspect. edit Or maybe I’ve been applying the wrong word to what I do my entire career…or misunderstanding why I’m valued. This is more possible than it might seem. edit For further context, i've held a wide variety of positions now within IT, including executive management. The problem is still, and I know this will sound stupid, I don't know how it is I got here, or why people valued me enough to keep me promoting me. I never even asked for the promotions they just...happened. This has made applying for new jobs harder, because I've never actually been entirely sure what my value is, so I often take jobs that are lower than my last job, but then everytime its not long before I end up well above that again. I eventually assumed it must be my troubleshooting capacity. I asked a CEO I worked with once at a smaller startup why it is he kept promoting me, and I got this story about how by just being in the room, everyone around me wants to do better work. Not because they are being told to do so, but because the work I do apparently just inspires people around me to do better. I was the truest example he had seen apparently of 'lead by example.' It's been very problematic because despite earning good money, and having never struggled to find, retain or advance in a job, I still don't truely know what it is exactly i'm good at. I think im terrible at explaining this. Every time I have tried to talk to someone about it in real life they just end up telling me I have impostor syndrome. Of course I do, I don't really know what the fuck it is I do.

jemmyw 2y ago

> But reliable car mechanics don't get paid a lot I dunno, the mechanic I go to is reliable and so busy it's hard to get a slot these days, and he seems to be doing very well for himself. So many mechanics are unreliable

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imglorp 2y ago

If you are debugging your work too much, maybe it's you. Obligatory Kernighan’s law: “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”

zem 2y ago

> Soon you'll be seen by others as a car mechanic. Maybe a reliable car mechanic. But reliable car mechanics don't get paid a lot. this argues for a messed up reward system for the company, not the engineer. all sufficiently large systems have bugs and performance issues, and adding a measure of reliability, stability, and speed is just as important as adding features.

fatbird 2y ago

My skill at troubleshooting has caused me to be the goto guy in every project, which lends great credibility and opportunities for leadership. Your pride in your troubleshooting skills isn't pride in a side-quest, it's pride in having a deep understanding of how systems work in general and in the specific. "Good troubleshooter" might not look great on a CV, but all of your coworkers naming you as the most valuable member of the team, and a natural leader, is worth more than any feature launches.

linza 2y ago
The value is in leadership, and being able to avoid certain classes of bugs from appearing in the first place. Troubleshooting just happens to be the skill that allows you to gain the knowledge to lead.
- fatbird 2y ago
  Exactly: "I found the root cause and corrected it. It may be an issue in these other two places so we should check there as well." "Great. How do we avoid issues like this in the future?" "By doing X thing a different way, and ensuring that Y thing is also in place."
tonyedgecombe 2y ago
>My skill at troubleshooting has caused me to be the goto guy in every project I stopped trying to be that person because it came with too many costs. It wasn't that I didn't want to do it but that I wanted other people to be able to in my absence.

pklausler 2y ago

Some kinds of troubleshooting are pretty important, though (e.g., medicine).

linza 2y ago

It's even worse than that. Making troubleshooting skills a profession in itself makes reliability a property of a specific person or team and not a property of the system. The former doesn't scale.

ConspiracyFact 2y ago
You’ll never be able to build a (large, complex) system that is consistently, inherently reliable over time and in response to change. You want to aim for such reliability but you still need troubleshooting ability.

dylan604 2y ago

> But reliable car mechanics don't get paid a lot. If you're a wizbang mechanic working for an import car repair, you can get paid a lot more in hourly labor fees than some of us make.

noisy_boy 2y ago
They were talking about reliable, 10x is worth a lot in most complex jobs.

hooverd 2y ago

You get more credit for putting out fires you started than building something that doesn't catch on fire in the first place.

tonyedgecombe 2y ago
I remember a post here from someone who would leave deliberate problems in his otherwise reliable code then would swoop in and fix them when the customer discovered them. Apparently the customer loved him. Personally I've seen people who struggled on a trivial problem get a strong rating from their manager afterwards.

RockRobotRock 2y ago

I have found myself to be someone that loves learning a little bit about various tech disciplines, but I've ended up as a "master of none" because I get bored quickly. Any advice for a career path that would reward such a thing?

esafak 2y ago
CTO :)

dotancohen 2y ago

> reliable car mechanics don't get paid a lot. Actually, they do. It's the unreliable car mechanics that need to swindle.

dghlsakjg 2y ago
Reliable mechanics have high rates and long waits everywhere I've lived. Hell, I've seen some that are so busy that they won't take new customers!
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  They also select reliable customers by their rates. People who will bring in their car on time, and pay the bill on time, and not feign outrage when you hand them the bill, and not try to nickel and dime you by providing their own parts or or asking you to do work based on their own diagnosis of the problem.

glitchc 2y ago

I'm not sure that I agree with this, not that I'm big on troubleshooting, but experienced SREs (Site Reliability Engineers) are worth their weight in gold and get paid an insane amount of money. Perhaps the key is to debug a vendor's solution rather than an in-house one.

willturman 2y ago

User credit_guy advocates for technical debt.

credit_guy 2y ago
Not at all. I do a lot of troubleshooting myself. Throughout my career (2 decades) I was very often the guy who did the troubleshooting. I still am, and I'm quite good at it. But I don't want to be known as the great troubleshooter in my team. I want to be known (and I am) as the guy who builds stuff.

Curiositry 2y ago

This is a fascinating take. I have been thinking about your comment for two days. I think you're right in some cases (when working in a field one has mastered, for example), and I think I could probably go in the direction of getting it right the first time. But the way I see it, any time I'm doing something new or innovative, I'm doing something I don't know how to do, which takes trial and error; and troubleshooting is basically figuring things out by trial and error, in a systematic way. Though a lot of time it is used for fixing bugs, I think troubleshooting as a skill and mindset is equally useful for creating new things, where you are solving for something.

ge96 2y ago
time dilation
- Curiositry 2y ago
  Based on the timestamps, it could only be. But this story, timestamps notwithstanding, was submitted by suprisetalk ~2 days ago. Then it was placed in news.ycombinator.com/pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool?next=43176091 https://news.ycombinator.com/pool?next=43176091), and got two comments; credit_guy's comment was one of them. Then, today, it hit the frontpage. Notice that if you mouse over "9 hours ago" on the story it shows the timestamp 2025-02-25. 9 hours ago was not 2025-02-25. If you mouse over the "7 hours ago" on credit_guy's comment, the timestamp shows 2025-02-26. One day after it was submitted, two days before it made the frontpage.

heisenbit 2y ago

Troubleshooting skills are really valuable but hard to market. You can deal with lot's of different technologies and effortless draw conclusions from for others totally disconnected domains. Sadly the tech market values expertise that is based on keywords. So while it is fun and creates huge value it is worth staying mostly on a path that can be explained to less mentally flexible mortals.

Vegenoid 2y ago

> But reliable car mechanics don't get paid a lot. I honestly don't know: do they not? The reliable mechanics in my city seem to do tons of business and charge significantly higher prices than the competition. I can think of a lot of software that I have stopped paying for because they did not fix bugs or performance issues. I can think of far less software that I stopped paying for because although it was reliable, they did not add more features to it - but I am an individual, not a business, and likely am not representative of the average software-buying individual. In software and systems that I have built for myself, the impact of fixing a bothersome bug is usually far higher than adding a new capability, but I may just be more bothered by bugs than most. Reliability and smooth, predictable operation are very important to me.

0manrho 2y ago

> But reliable car mechanics don't get paid a lot. Not a great analogy. Reliable car mechanics often get paid very well in comparison to their peers. Used to be one. Got into tech as a result of how much tech got into cars. Do they pay as well as tech jobs? Depends. I made more money and worked less hours than my buddy in IT at one of the largest corporations in America in the same city (granted not a techhub like SV, Seattle, NYC, etc, but most places aren't). The key differentiator here is not time spent building vs time spent repairing (troubleshooting). It's knowing what's worth spending your time on, and when to say "No", because not everything needs fixed, nor is every problem necessarily yours to solve. Truly good diagnostics skills is knowing what's worth spending time on, regardless of whether it's repairing something that exists or building something that doesn't. A tire with only 10% of treadwear could technically be replaced with something better, but is that worth anyone's time or money? Probably not. But if the tire on the opposite side is still brand new, and they were replaced at the same time, diagnostics tells you the alignment is off, and that issue - whatever it may be - very well could be worth everyone's time and money to fix. Code is no different. Don't try to fix/improve/build everything. Focus on what matters. Good troubleshooting/diagnostic skills is a big part of knowing what does, and doesn't.

miguelazo 2y ago

There is some truth to what you’re saying, but that’s just another example of (particularly American) capitalism’s masterful misallocation of resources when it comes to compensation.

fredophile 2y ago

I spend way more time troubleshooting than I do building new things. I'm a lead programmer on my team. I regularly hop on impromptu zoom calls to help people out with thorny problems or jump into slack conversations. I don't get a lot of focused time for building new stuff. I'm more valuable to my team keeping them running smoothly and enforcing standards that avoid some of the nastier troubleshooting.

forgetfreeman 2y ago

This take seems pretty short-sighted. You may well have a point regarding what hiring managers actually value but speaking from experience having a couple people on hand that are better at solving problems than manufacturing them is pretty clutch in most settings where results are actually important.

brailsafe 2y ago

Reliable car mechanics with ambition actually get paid fairly well compared to actually complacent car mechanics. It's not staff software engineer money, but it's pretty decent, and a hell of a lot less of whichever qualities one associates with working in tech for better or worse. I don't think those qualities are mutually exclusive. But, much like everything, it goes without saying almost that generally you should have a variety of skills you can bring to the table.

mrayycombi 2y ago

Complacency is not just feeling good, but doing so while ignoring a risk. You can feel good about addressing risks, the opposite of complacency.

ForTheKidz 2y ago

> You are becoming complacent. I think that's just having a job. There's nothing inherently better about building than fixing. Hell, anyone can build something these days. You can get chatgpt to write you a fully functional bootloader without knowing a single bit of assembly or how booting operates. Being able to grasp and fix things is already the superlative talent worth hiring for. > But reliable car mechanics don't get paid a lot. The equivalent in our industry is worth a lot more money than someone who can only build. I think "building" is a lot closer to your analogy of using a word processor than "fixing" things is and you've got the reputation of the two skills completely swapped.

autonomousErwin 2y ago

I think I know what you mean, in an ideal world - we wouldn't have bugs. You'd build a feature and it would work forever but that's rarely the case. I think of it as "offensive" and "defensive" building, ideally you want to be on the offensive (i.e. building stuff that wasn't there yesterday) but you have to balance it with good defence (i.e. adding a certain type of anti-fragility to your system by fixing bugs due to your features being exposed to the real world). Saying this, I've never met a good engineer who wasn't very good at troubleshooting so perhaps it's more of a consequence of building than a skillset.

technofiend 2y ago

I agree the need for troubleshooting can be born from poor decisions, but it's still a marketable skill for places that need it at scale. One of my roles was head of Linux Engineering for a Fortune 50. Sure there's the pets vs cattle thing and we all prefer cattle, but particularly in places with lots of legacy apps and infrastructure there are plenty of both that need more nuance than turning it off and back on again. There's value in fixing things in the moment and then feeding them back to your engineer and architecture functions to address endemic issues so that everyone benefits.