Debugging

At Level 3, you are a go-to debugger. You bring structure, patience, and insight to even the messiest incidents. You take ambiguous bug reports and turn them into clear diagnoses and sustainable fixes. You also help your team debug better—by modeling good habits, sharing strategies, and improving tools or processes that reduce time to resolution.

Key Behaviors

  • Finds root causes for complex or intermittent issues
  • Uses advanced tools (profilers, distributed tracing, etc.) as needed
  • Identifies patterns across issues and suggests systemic fixes
  • Teaches debugging techniques in pairing or reviews
  • Improves the team’s observability, logging, or diagnostics

Common Struggles

  • May spend too long solving edge cases with low impact
  • Can default to solo investigation instead of pairing or sharing knowledge
  • Might undervalue quick fixes or workarounds when appropriate

Success Indicators

You know you're successful when you:

  • Regularly solve hard bugs and prevent them from recurring
  • Build or improve tools that help others debug
  • Make the team more resilient by documenting what you learn
  • Know when to go deep—and when to stop

Mindset Shift

From:

"I can solve tough bugs."

To:

"I help systems and teams debug themselves."

Questions to Ask Yourself

  • What recurring issues could we eliminate with better visibility?
  • How could we detect or prevent this earlier next time?
  • Who else needs to understand what I’ve uncovered?

Build These Habits

  • 1
    Proactively improve logs, alerts, and dashboards
  • 2
    Share debugging wins and lessons with the team
  • 3
    Investigate not just the bug—but the context and conditions

Seek Feedback

  • “Was the way I debugged this transparent and shareable?”
  • “Could someone else solve this faster next time because of me?”
  • “Are we tracking the right things to catch this earlier?”

Signals You're Ready to Level Up

  • Other engineers ask how you solved a tricky issue
  • Your fixes address causes, not just symptoms
  • The team debugs more effectively because of your tools or patterns

Focus Summary

  • See the signals
  • Follow the thread
  • Leave the trail better than you found it

At Level 3, you don’t just fix bugs—you prevent them, teach about them, and make systems easier to debug for everyone.