Debugging - length of time

Question

Some people say that debugging can take a few hours, others days depending on the code base (legacy or larger at a bigger tech company). On average, if I am at an earlier stage startup or a mid-size company (or big FAANGMULA), how long should this be?

I feel like I've been wasting a lot more time on debugging for deploying (lots of minor syntax errors and stuff AI may not catch or careless mistakes and other dependency conflicts) than on actual real logic and I feel like it's taking forever. I just want to be sure I'm spending my time well for my projects, since I have so many, and even if this is one of my earlier ones, I'm worried that I'm spending too much time on it, even if my code quality is higher.

Alex Chiou · Accepted Answer

It's hard to assign a proper length to bugs as they vary a lot. It's true that bugs will get bigger and gnarlier on average as the company grows (I've seen engineers literally spend 2+ months fixing a single bug at FAANG), but it's not like there aren't bugs startups need to solve that can take several days or even a couple weeks.  My broader advice as always is to work backwards from the goal, especially for startups where you need to move fast. If some bug is putting your critical launch at risk, consider the other options besides knuckling through and fixing it:  Patch fix that addresses the symptoms, not the root cause Ignore it (maybe log an error but that's it) Drop the feature with the bug entirely  What I will say though is that if your codebase is relatively simple (less than 5 engineers working on it and less than 100,000 lines of code), and you keep running into crazy bugs that take a long time to fix, you need to step back and reconsider how you're architecting the codebase (and how your team overall is approaching code quality).

Debugging - length of time

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