- Assume nothing
- Believe nothing
- Challenge and check everything
- use a mindmap
- seek alternative explanations
- recruit a devils advocateDebugging and troubleshooting isn't art or magic, it's just being very boringly methodical and building from the ground up. A single assumption and you're off to a dead end, a single thing taken on hearsay and you will repeat what other people already did, failure to challenge and check will no doubt make you miss something that it crucial to solving the problem.
(That said, it's easy to say in retrospect. In the moment there is always judgement about what to verify first, and of course its always the last thing you check that turns out to be the problem)
Some problems have a single root cause, some have multiple independent root causes, and some issues present when root causes have an interaction type effect.
Probably you could extend your theory to 'first google result for question 'x''.
I learned that what works best is a systematic approach and what works badly is overlooking certain parts to save time based on intuitive assumptions.
I can't count the number of bugs that took me days because I've just jumped to the "heart" of the problem assuming the rest that got me there was fine. Only to have someone else looking at the problem with less knowledge, going through tings that seemed mundane but who finally gave valuable hints even if they were not problematic themselves.
If we are going to play a game of what you’re allowed to assume and what you aren’t allowed to assume, then you aren’t a detective, you’re a pawn for someone else’s bidding and their strategic movements. Ditto for believing and challenging whatever “facts” you are allowed to believe and challenge.
If you knew the kind of statistics that Pew collects, and how they can be interpreted, you would believe very little indeed.
But if we just keep that aside for a millisecond, doesn't he have a valid point in a way? Isn't it reputational suicide these days to question the popular narrative in many regards? (And yes, let the downvotes roll in, thereby proving my point :))