So true. I spent the bulk of my early SW development career in distributed systems that were complex enough that they felt like they had a mind of their own. What I learned back then is that my intuition was worthless. Maybe that's just me but the key to success was always to set aside your expectation of what your code does and instead spend more time instrumenting and collecting data on what was actually going on. This is especially true for completely asynchronous systems like networks or systems that integrate multiple independent subsystems. Things just don't happen in the order you expected when timeouts, aborted operations and retries bubble up and down your OS and application stack.

After 30 years I consider myself pretty capable in debugging such systems but one thing I never use is "intuition" as defined in the beginning of the article.