Comment by kqr
5 days ago
It's a different mindset. Has nothing to do with curiosity.
For me and you, "fixing" something means finding which assumption was violated and redesigning the solution in light of that. Sometimes this means adding code, sometimes it means making the solution smaller.
For a lot of people, "fixing" means adding code to make it work. This always makes the solution larger.
The latter group can still be curious! But they're curious about which addition makes it work, not about their incorrect beliefs.
An engineer that refuses to understand how their craft is constructed is a poor engineer.
> For a lot of people, "fixing" means adding code to make it work.
What if the fix requires deleting a single line of code?
Is the additive fix to enshroud it in if (0) { } ?
What I saw in these cases, the result was a few levels removed from the root cause and they'd add the same workaround to like 5 different places (and miss one or two) instead of tracking it back to the origin where the fix was that simple.
Usually something more subtle like adding an early return somewhere before the offending line, or inheriting from that class and blanking that method, or something along those lines.