alt Hacker NewsThis does depend on who you are; If you're a senior with 10+ years of experience, it's a failure of your abilities to cut your losses or know when to seek help if you take far too long debugging something.
But for juniors, it's invaluable experience. And as a field we're already seeing problems resulting from the new generations of juniors being taught with modern web development, whose complexity is very obstructing of debugging.
There are definitely situations where you can't ask for help and you can't turn your back on the bug.
I worked on a project that depended on an open source but deprecated/unmaintained Linux kernel module that we used for customers running RHEL[1]. There were a number of serious bugs causing panics that we encountered, but only for certain customers with high VFS workloads. I spent days to a week+ on each one, reading kernel code, writing userland utilities to repro the problem, and finally committing fixes to the module. I was the only one on the team up to the task.
We couldn't tell the customers to upgrade, we couldn't write an alternative module in a reasonable timeframe, and they paid us a lot of money, so I did what I had to do.
I'm sure there are lots of other examples like this out there.
[1] Known for its use of ancient kernels with 10000 patches hand-picked by Red Hat. At least at the time (5-10 years ago).