Debugging spider sense is definitely an upside of spending years working with terrible code.
I once moved into a place that was great, except the shower would start out hot, quickly drop to warm, and then stay warm for as long as we cared to try it. I hated this, so every time I showered I'd spend some time trying to debug it, despite knowing nothing about plumbing.
Eventually I asked myself: why do normal hot water heaters work the other way, where they stay hot a long time and then get pretty cold? Clearly, there's some way of keeping the incoming cold water separate from the already-heated hot water, like by putting the output pipe at the top and the input pipe at the bottom. But if you reverse them, you might get what we had.
I leapt out of the shower and felt the hot water heater pipes and sure enough, reversed. My landlord came over shortly thereafter and fixed it, and I felt very smug when I had my first properly hot shower.
I once spent over a year debugging a furnace. It would run fine, except every now and then on it would just refuse to turn on for a day or two. Eventually noticed it was only rainy days, and was due to it thinking the exhaust was blocked because there wasn't enough pressure differential between input air and exhaust.
Turned out the installer had failed to put in the high altitude kit which told it to expect a smaller pressure differential. Mostly it was fine, but on rainy days with low barometric pressure, the difference would drop below threshold. But I had to be home for enough rainy days to figure it out.
I once moved into a place that was great, except the shower would start out hot, quickly drop to warm, and then stay warm for as long as we cared to try it. I hated this, so every time I showered I'd spend some time trying to debug it, despite knowing nothing about plumbing.
Eventually I asked myself: why do normal hot water heaters work the other way, where they stay hot a long time and then get pretty cold? Clearly, there's some way of keeping the incoming cold water separate from the already-heated hot water, like by putting the output pipe at the top and the input pipe at the bottom. But if you reverse them, you might get what we had.
I leapt out of the shower and felt the hot water heater pipes and sure enough, reversed. My landlord came over shortly thereafter and fixed it, and I felt very smug when I had my first properly hot shower.