no offense, but you sound like a programmer at either a small, or maybe medium sized conpany. Where code is all known to you, and touched by you (based upon you

no offense, but you sound like a programmer at either a small, or maybe medium sized conpany. Where code is all known to you, and touched by you (based upon your 'when I code..' sentence used). I regularly run into bugs that take longer than several hours to find, not talking about fixing. I admit, not the thing you like to get in an ideal world, but all the more you run into in the real world. Deadlines and 10+ year old platforms introduce hacks, and untested code. back to the original post; i kind of like this in a mildly manner. as said in another comment, I also tend to hunt until I recognize a lockup. At that time I step back, walk to a drawing board and invite some colleagues to hear my brain pondering and running over several options while visualizing the pipeline on the board. This gives me three things: - experience of other colleagues - visualization of the problem to get clear what is happening. - probably coffee and some smalltalk over completely different things which at that time seem completely logical to originate from the thing explained. It relaxes me. Back at my desk Im all fresh again, new ideas to try out etc. Bottom line, sometimes taking a step back helps for me as well. Although I like to see it as a last resort, while I (now again) know I should start doing this more often, and especially at an earlier stage. To end with the start, when you run in a multiple day bug you should immediatly write a test for it, after solving. Make sure you dont run in it again :).