What is a programmer's worst nightmare?

A foreign programmer asked a question on Quora: "What is the programmer's worst nightmare?" This article excerpts several popular replies to this question and answer post.

Brain Schmitz Software Engineer Intern at Google (2012, 2013), Microsoft (2014), CS major at UT Austin in Turing Scholars honors program

The worst bug I've ever encountered:

Bugs only occur in production environments and cannot be reproduced or triggered locally

The probability of a bug appearing is low, but not enough to ignore it.

The bug is caused by a race condition, which only occurs when the system is under low load.

The real reason for the bug is still unknown

You didn’t write the buggy code, but you’re responsible for fixing it; the person who wrote that code is no longer with the company

The bug is caused by a library that is reliable 99.9% of the time. This is your last remaining hurdle to solving the problem.

Many people have tried to debug it over the years, but no one has succeeded.

A bug creates a logical error that only appears after the system has been running for a long time.

Debugging requires domain knowledge that you know nothing about

The deadline to fix the bug is very tight, time is running out

Don’t ignore this bug, because your job depends on it.

Imagine how disgusting it is to debug a race condition on a Mars rover from Earth using optical pulse signals, which can only occur in the atmospheric conditions of Mars when the planets begin to align. All because of some subtle and esoteric problem in the embedded code generated by a library written by someone who left NASA many years ago. You must solve this problem quickly because the next planetary alignment is about to start and millions of dollars of project funds are at risk of being wasted.

No, none of this has ever happened. But doesn't it make you want to jump off a bridge? :)

Jarmo Dee

The above is nothing. A programmer's worst nightmare is to have an unqualified, non-technical project manager who sets extremely tight deadlines and always wants to be in charge of everything.

Colin Song

Requirements changed, well, they changed again.

Jim Bobrien

The boss decided to change the product positioning direction, and thought that all the changes would be simple, and made various promises to the customer without consulting the technical team. Oh, and IE browser support was also required.

Lalit Jain

The same code worked fine on Friday, but not on Monday :D

Shivam Sarawagi

Internet Explorer (if you are a web developer)

Jorge Lrun

Ask a question on StackOverflow and see that someone posted the exact same question you were about to ask a year ago, but there was no response...

Ben Joseph

Stack Overflow is unavailable!

Naman Dasot

The semicolon key is broken :(

Abhishek Walter

Stackoverflow question limit reached