So my boss thinks of debugging as a guessing game. As in you just say random things that have not even the slightest relation with the code where the bug is ... now i know why it take days to fix a little bug...

I laugh. But its not bloody funny if you have to sit and watch this fumbling around.

@kunashe true story. the problem is that this is how my day goes whenever there is a problem that he feels he has to get involved into solving it. For ex. today he spend 5h 'debugging' something, while i had to observe. And whenever i was politely suggesting to look in a specific place he was denying it ... then 5h later he gave up and i solved it in 5 minutes.
I feel dead inside after every encounter like this one

@krates it seems like a subtle dominance game.

You win by prolonging the other persons pain. If you want win this game - you have to forget about being efficient or doing things the right way.

Just be two moves ahead of him. Make subtle predictions of exactly how his tests will fail. If you're right enough times, I bet he wont wanna play.

Had a boss like this. When my colleague was trying to debug something, this non-coder boss was constantly hanging over his shoulder throwing out random, nonsense suggestions for what could be causing the issue every 2 minutes. Every day. He called this process "debugging by brainstorming".

I called it "causing my colleague to retire early with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder".

@wizzzard i agree ... can be pretty traumatizing ... problem is that he is technically a coder too