I've found past a certain point career-wise, troubleshooting really can't be taught. It's sort of a a mindset/attitude to me. I you are 5+ years into your career and haven't gotten there, you probably just don't care. It's the attitude of a developer who is indifferent to the craft and just wants to cobble together found code as quickly as possible to move onto the next thing.

A good troubleshooter can enable higher output across a team because they are like grease in the machine. Particularly indifferent troubleshooters become a net drag because instead of being able to help others they are always interrupting others for help.

"troubleshooting really can't be taught" Exactly: it is a gift. You have "the Knack". (Dilbert - The Knack "The Curse of the Engineer")

I don’t believe that’s true. It’s an attitude, not some kind of innate skill like reflexes. You can learn to believe in yourself, plus it’s teachable in my experience.

That would be more of a psychological hack. I've never seen this happen. My experience is people behave a certain way (care about what they do up to a roughly defined level) and 10 years later they behave the same. Self esteem tends to change or fluctuate and can be thought, but personally i believe that is not enough for a non-troubleshooting mindset to turn around. Unless you could convince me otherwise?

Yes attitudes are harder to learn than skills aren't they?

Ever notice people get more stubborn and stuck in their ways over time?

It's possible you cannot teach people to want different things.

I think it has to do with interests. Some people have an inmate interest in how stuff works, and specifically how it breaks.

I think you can teach someone to troubleshoot in a procedural and methodical manner, but they will always lack the creative "spark" that comes from being actually interested. Procedural troubleshooters are useful, but they won't exceed the bounds of the model they've been taught to work under.

Right - can you teach people to like different things? Maybe? Generally, no.

Strongly agree. I think it correlates with high level of curiosity.

Also, for example, so many developers could see an issue and fix it without really understanding how the fix works.

I literally cannot live with that and have to understand why something works the way it works

Absolutely.

I was a manager for over 25 years, and this was exactly the type of thing that I looked for.

LeetCode tests actually tend to bias against that kind of skill.

I hired a contractor who thought she had bombed the interview because she didn’t solve the problem I gave her immediately and struggled with it. But when she got stuck it was because she was not seeing that the code she wrote didn’t match the code she described planning to write.

But she didn’t panic, she cracked open the debugger and went section by section through the code until she finally spotted her typo. Which is exactly the sort of person who won’t crumble every time something doesn’t work exactly the way the documentation says it does. We hired six people, and only renewed two, of which she was one. So as far as I’m concerned, I succeeded in my interview.