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In 1994, Intel's floating-point team discovered their new Pentium chip was spitting out wrong answers for certain division operations. Not a big deal, they thought. Just a few edge cases.

So they did what any good engineering team does: they started fixing the individual cases. One by one. Case 2,345: patch it. Case 4,672: patch it. Case 8,901: patch it.

For months, these brilliant engineers practiced debugging. Every day, they'd find another wrong calculation, trace through the logic, and apply another fix.

They were getting really good at patching. Lightning fast, actually. They could spot a bad division result and write a microcode workaround in minutes.

But here's the thing that haunts engineering textbooks to this day: they were practicing the wrong skill entirely.

The real problem wasn't individual cases. It was their lookup table. Five missing entries in a 2,048-entry table were causing systematic errors. One root cause. Thousands of symptoms.

While Intel's engineers spent months becoming world-class symptom-fixers, a math professor at Lynchburg College spent one afternoon understanding the actual pattern and published the real solution.

Intel's "practice" made them permanently good at the wrong thing. The professor's perfect practice - focusing on understanding the underlying system rather than fixing surface issues - solved the problem that stumped a team of PhD engineers.

This is why "practice makes perfect" is dangerous bullsh*t. Practice makes permanent. If you're practicing the wrong approach, you're building expertise in failure.

Anders Ericsson spent decades studying world-class performers and found they don't just practice more - they practice with immediate feedback loops, progressive difficulty, and obsessive focus on their weaknesses, not their strengths.

That senior engineer who's been "debugging for 15 years"? If they spent 15 years practicing symptom-whacking instead of root-cause analysis, a junior engineer who learns systematic debugging can outperform them in months.

The next time you're debugging a gnarly issue, resist the urge to just fix it and move on. Ask yourself: "What am I actually practicing here? Am I getting better at quick fixes, or am I building the mental models that will make the next 100 problems easier?"

Perfect practice means practicing the skill you actually want to build, not just the one that feels productive in the moment.

This applies to everything in engineer. Quality beats quantity every time.

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