This is something that never gets old to me - seeing other experienced devs playing guessing games instead of instrumenting the problem thing and walking through it step by step.

That’s not to say that you can’t guess the first, or second place to look, but that’s where it should end.

The second thing I see often from smart devs is that they find some bug, assume it’s the one they came looking for and declare victory.

The third is the worse by far, which is to blame the cloud provider/vendor for all issues, especially you not reading their documentation.

Somewhere in that hierarchy is:

Preemptively give up and say, "We can't reproduce that."

We work with the same contractors then.

More generally, if people would go and see for themselves more often a lot would be better in the world. Mere observation is surprisingly powerful if you take the time to do it with an open mind.

David Agans' book "Debugging" has a chapter called "Quit Thinking and Look". It is quite old by IT standards, but I cannot recommend it enough.

Wow!

I've never seen or heard anyone else express that idea before!

I guess I don't have to write that book then :)

I know this topic is pretty exhausted, but hey...

In the terrible movie The Internship they have this "contest" for the interns, where they're all told of a server that has suddenly stopped serving up digital photos.

So they all start writing on a glass wall. No intern says, "hey, let's go and look at the server logs!" Not cinematic, I guess.