The Debug Trap: Why Smart Engineers Waste Hours on Trivial Problems

The Question Nobody Asks The Change Principle (It’s Not Rocket Science) The Revert Rebellion The Exotic Bug Fallacy The Debug Stack The Meta Problem Posted on September 4, 2025 by Anshul Sao, Co-Founder & CTO at Facets. cloud Last month, I watched three senior engineers burn four hours debugging a “mysterious” Kubernetes issue that turned out to be a kubectl version upgrade. The same week, another team spent an entire night hunting phantom load balancer bugs when a certificate rotation had broken mobile clients with certificate pinning. These aren’t stories about incompetent engineers. These are stories about brilliant people falling into the same cognitive trap that catches everyone: diving deep instead of looking broad. Here’s what happened with the kubectl disaster. The symptoms looked serious: cron jobs failing, secrets not updating across namespaces, image pulls crashing left and right. Classic distributed systems chaos, right? The team immediately went into full forensic mode. Pod logs. RBAC permissions. Service account configurations. Network policies.