Why Don't Schools Teach Debugging? (2014)

This is an easy one to answer.

Teachers/Professors don't know how to debug programs only how to teach beginning programming.

You won't find a class on debugging. Books are not written on debugging only on learning how to code.

I worked for a community college as a student worker, and I worked in a computer lab and debugged the student's programs. I learned as many languages as I could. The teachers/professors could not debug the programs so they gave them to me to debug for them.

If you take a MOOC or go to a Programming Bootcamp they don't teach you how to debug. They teach you how to code.

Debugging is part of a quality control process that isn't taught but should be taught. In a business management only cares about how much time it takes to finish a project and doesn't care if the code is buggy. It used to be an issue of writing bug free code when computers were slower and has less memory but since RAM is cheap and computers are faster now bugs that usually slowed down programs don't matter anymore.

I was known for my debugging skills, could alter algorithms so they ran faster, could fix memory leaks so programs uses less RAM, would set up buffers to speed up database access etc. But it took extra time to do those sort of things. Management kept cutting the deadlines for completing projects where it wasn't possible to debug code anymore. Fix it later, ship buggy code and let the users reboot their PCs when they have a problem.

You find so many programmers these days that don't know how to debug the code, because they were never taught how. So it is full of security holes, runs slow, has memory leaks, slow database connections, but it is good enough in that it compiles without errors and can be shipped.

I became a dinosaur around 2003, nobody wanted to hire a debugger anymore. Sloppy code was in, managed code was out.

Survivorship bias might be an issue here. The professors went through their education and careers without anyone teaching them how to debug, and they survived. All their colleagues went through the same process, and survived. Maybe they can debug their own work and the work of undergraduates, but they were never taught the process, they just picked it up by osmosis.

The article says the professors used the phrase "some students just can’t hack it in engineering" which suggests they see some aspects of engineering as things that can't be acquired, intrinsic abilities of those who can hack it in engineering. If they see debugging (or some related skill) as one of these aspects, then they wouldn't see any benefit from teaching them.