I think that every industry has its annoyances, and fixing bugs is part of ours. As much as I love coding, it's hard to enjoy staring at code for hours trying to figure out what's wrong. However, there is no other feeling than solving a hard problem. Unless it was a stupidly simple typo of course π΅.
Programming / building new things is fun, maintaining existing things not so much.
I love solving bugs. The more challenging they are, the more I immerse myself in the technologies used and the more opportunities to refactor I see. Maybe I just haven't found an annoying enough bug to put me off but, yes, I think debugging is pretty interesting.
Bugs are irritating. However the feeling once you solved a big one.... so amazing. Makes being a software engineer really worth it :D
Just yesterday, I solved a mystery in an app I develop for a customer. The app ran everywhere (browsers, Windows, Android), just not on the iPhone. It started up and some code was running, but the damn thing did not budge when I clicked a button to connect to a server. Worst part: ever tried to debug a Cordova App on an iPhone? There just is no way. So I had to add lots of logging and was searching around for two weeks, before I finally solved the bug. Yesterday was the best evening since long :)
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.
~ Brian Kernighan
Bugs are part of the work of a developer.
It's not because you don't find any that they are not lurking in the dark with their glowy blood thirsty eyes!
But I would say that if you have bugs in your code, you are the one to blame. As developers, we have the responsibility to be careful about how we implement things.
Yes we hate bugs, because they remind us how inferior we feel against computers that are so stupid they even crash when we do big enough mistakes.
But we should learn from our mistakes and try to not repeat the same error again. This is how we grow as developers, but more essentially as human beings.
This is what is fun for me, I feel I learn everyday!
Of course, if we speak of someone else's bugs, that is f***ing irritating. But even though, we can learn from others' mistakes.
Gergely Polonkai
You have to believe in things that are not true. How else would they become?
Imagine you build sand castles all day, every day. You don't do it (only) for money, but because you like it so much. Now imagine some parts constantly collapsing. You want to create perfect castles, so you fix it. And then another part caves in. Then a crab tramples over the whole thing. You are building it for days, but you don't get to finish it because of all these glitches.
Debugging software is similar. Some minor bugs are really annoying. Just like customer requests. We must fix/implement those in order to get our money, instead of doing the fun work of planning and implementing new, interesting features.
Some bugs are really challenging, though. They can hide from you for weeks before finally fixing them, and until then, they are awfully irritating. But then comes euphoria.
Programming in itself is not fun. Solving challenging problems is.