Software Engineer Should Probably Cool It With The Print Statements After Two Hours Of Getting Nowhere

May 10, 2017

NEW YORK - Totally engrossed with finding the source of his module's race condition, area engineer Francis Eaton this afternoon was blissfully unaware of the irredeemable number of printf statements he had drizzled over his team's codebase since identifying the presence of the bug this morning. The engineer, who was initially upbeat about the challenge ahead, made a valiant effort using gdb to step through the code in search of the problem. When this proved ineffective, he was unable to resist his caveman instincts and began wildly stuffing the eight different affected classes full to the gills of print statements to follow program flow.

Witnesses observed the engineer poring over his terminal while it vomited out an incomprehensible deluge of gibberish strings, method names, serialized objects, and obscenities as end-to-end tests were executed again and again. One colleague of Eaton's characterized his behavior as totally normal, suggesting he was "reading the terminal tea leaves". Shortly after lunch, an exasperated Eaton still had yet to discover the source of the race condition even after maxing out the terminal buffer spewing rubbish into stdout.

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