I fixed a long standing bug that was a companies top priority for several months and no one had been able to fix it. They were talking about re-writing an entire app to resolve it, at a cost of 100's of thousands of dollar, dragging the vendor over the coals etc.
I was relatively new and thought I'd take a look, ignoring all the mystique surrounding the problem. It turned out to be a simple one line fix, just a dumb oversight that anyone who bothered to understand and step through the code would have caught.
Things got a little weird after that haha. The director who had been responsible for that department started ignoring me, while I started to get pulled into look at all sorts of other peoples urgent issues, with zero context, often with a team of other people I didn't know on the call.
It was fun while it lasted, but man, I'm glad I'm no Doogie Howser MD, that shit would go to your head!
People usually don't see the history of these kind of systems.
In most cases these issues are a result of similar kind of patching of a previous similar issue resulting in unexpected outcomes. (Probably going on for years)
From my experience management often tries to ignore the bigger refactors by using inexperienced people to patch things repeatedly, meanwhile the team suffocates under technical debt and responsibilities as a result of this mentality.
Sometimes its better to stick with the dev team for long term goals instead of becoming a "management puppet" for short term wins.
I fixed a long standing bug that was a companies top priority for several months and no one had been able to fix it. They were talking about re-writing an entire app to resolve it, at a cost of 100's of thousands of dollar, dragging the vendor over the coals etc.
I was relatively new and thought I'd take a look, ignoring all the mystique surrounding the problem. It turned out to be a simple one line fix, just a dumb oversight that anyone who bothered to understand and step through the code would have caught.
Things got a little weird after that haha. The director who had been responsible for that department started ignoring me, while I started to get pulled into look at all sorts of other peoples urgent issues, with zero context, often with a team of other people I didn't know on the call.
It was fun while it lasted, but man, I'm glad I'm no Doogie Howser MD, that shit would go to your head!