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Comment by _t0du | Hacker News Reader

"How does this even get invoked" and "Where would I go to find these logs" are the two questions that, if the answers are not obvious/obviously documented, there is a big problem with that particular system.

My current company for whatever reason does not value logging at all, to the point where for lots of our systems there just aren't logs/nobody has ever bothered to look for them. It's pretty astonishing to me, a person who has valued logging as one of the highest-value mechanisms to increase tracibility.

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Prior to moving to software development, I worked 5 years in Support and consequently I have a murderous hatred of anyone writing software that is hard to debug and logging is a huge part of that.

I was actually greatly inspired by a product I used to support which had such detailed logs that you could troubleshoot almost any issue from the (rather huge) log dump. I try to do the same now.

I really wish all developers had to do support at the beginning of their careers and so they understand how to build things that the ops team can work with. Devops/SREs are one approach to this, but I'd really like to see it be more widespread.

I share your enthusiam for good logs, so am curious what made this product's logging great from a support perspective?

I wonder if they simply haven't seen a strong application of logging, and therefore don't know what they're missing.

Is there an opportunity in your daily work to sneak some good logging into a complex subsystem to show how valuable it can be?

It's basically what happens when technically incompetent and inexperienced people wear management hats. If I was running a firm, the engineers would dictate to management, not the other way around.

I feel like this sentiment is easy to say, but basically impossible to implement.

For any new work that I do, logging will obviously be at the top of my priority list. Unfortunately, the systems that need the logging the most are the systems that I can only touch when they go down.

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