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War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged

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462 points jakevoytko | 4 comments | 24 Mar 25 14:37 UTC | HN request time: 1.893s | source
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Taniwha ◴[27 Mar 25 11:26 UTC] No.43492456[source]▶
In interviews I've never forced anyone to code, what I do is try to get them to tell me these sorts of war stories - I want to hear how you fixed it, why it was cooly bizarre, and I'm hoping for some enthusiasm when you talk about it.

I couldn't always get people to talk this way, but people who did usually worked out well

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1. kccqzy ◴[27 Mar 25 12:46 UTC] No.43493025[source]▶
You are selecting for the kind of person who always like to think about the war stories and brag about them.
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2. AnimalMuppet ◴[27 Mar 25 15:23 UTC] No.43494604[source]▶
No, they're selecting for the kind of person who can tell a war story when asked. They're also selecting for the kind of people who had to debug something gnarly enough and different enough that it was memorable.
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3. kccqzy ◴[27 Mar 25 15:55 UTC] No.43494964[source]▶
Some people are not natural story tellers. Telling a story is not a usual part of the job responsibility of a software engineer—we aren't novelists. Having a memorable debugging experience doesn't directly equate to having a good story to tell.

This is really the same issue with the promo culture we see at Big Tech companies: you end up promoting the people who are good at crafting promo packets i.e. telling stories about their work. There is certainly a good overlap between that and the people who do genuinely good work, but it's not a perfect overlap.

Personally I don't really mind it because I consider myself good at story telling. But as an interviewer I would never do that to a candidate because not everyone can tell good stories.

4. Suppafly ◴[27 Mar 25 18:55 UTC] No.43496830[source]▶
This, whenever I get these sorts of questions on interviews I don't know how to answer, because my weirdest or hardest bug isn't something I've internalized as a war story, it was just another day.

It's just like those "what did you do when you had conflict with another employee" questions. I either worked it out with them like an adult or got our management involved and they worked it out for them. It's not some hero narrative I considered much past the time it happened.