It seems like my previous post was liked by a number of people, maybe this is a topic I will continue writing about. Here is Chapter 2...
Today I had a team member tell me during stand up that he couldn't figure out the ticket he was working on, so he decided to just work on something else. Then, our team's coop piped in and said he too looked at the same ticket, and couldn't figure out how to replicate the bug (which clearly still exist in our production and staging environment), so he put it back into the Ready column of our Jira board.
This, got me rather upset.
It would have been perfectly acceptable if they had said, "Hey, I need hand with this", but to just give up? And worse, give up and put the ticket back in to Ready state? What sort of solution is that? How is this going to help any of the other team members? How is this going to help our customers? No, giving up is simply not acceptable.
I imagine one of the reasons we get into the field of technology is we like problem solving. While we may not admit it, the most odd duck weird one off bugs are the stuff that we enjoy digging at the most (sometime at the frustration of our PMs since these tickets take far longer than expected to resolve). It should be that professional curiosity that drives us to think, "hey, I don't understand why this is happening, but the code is all there, and the problem clearly exists, so I am going to figure this one out!"
I wonder if perhaps, stubbornness is a trait that is actually is helpful in our field. Unless you aspire to be a mindless code monkey and never want to tackle any real tough problems in our field, there will be plenty of times where something just doesn't work the way you expect it to work, and it's going to take a lot of time and energy to figure it out. I honestly think these are character building moments and opportunities for real learning. When you do finally get the breakthrough "aha" moment, it will be well worth the effort. Sure, there will some occassions where that "aha" moment also came with the sudden realization that it was some terrible typo that caused the whole thing, but there are also many other moments when you really learn about how something works under the hood. When you get that sort of a moment, it feels immensely satisfying to have done the deep dive.
I think it was this stubbornness that drove me to spend thousands of hours honing my skills in the shooting sports. Standing on top of the podium and having "O'Canada" played for me isn't something that comes easily. It is the same stubbornness that when I encounter technical situations like what my team member ran into today, that I will dive in with both feet with the aim of getting to the bottom of the issue!
