The Debug Trap: Why Smart Engineers Waste Hours on Trivial Problems

No problem interspersed through >7 layers of abstraction in different codebases across different feature sets and implementations is trivial even if at the end of the day the symbolic representation is "number went up". If you're relying on abstraction, and you don't intimately know the abstraction well enough, you're in danger of writing posts like these. The solution to all problems is debugging and attention to the change stream. All 240 hours 'wasted' were, in fact, a valuable training exercise, that is a part of doing business in the field.