8 hours? That's newbie stuff.

I've had problems that nobody else could solve which is when they call me in and some of those took weeks to figure out.

In one case (COBOL) we had a problem where code like this (pseudo code)...

if some condition
   True statement 1
   True statement 2.
Statement 3.
Statement 4.

Was bringing statement 3 up into the True branch of the if, when it should always be executed (I.e. it isn't part of the if statement). Statement 4 was the first unconditionally executed statement.

Now you sort of need to understand the importance of fullstops/periods in COBOL. they are a sort of statement and block terminator.

In the above, the full stop after statement 2 ends the if - or it is supposed to, but in this case it didn't.

This problem was a mystery including all the way up to the compiler support team in the vendor's top level support. It was a mystery for close on 4 weeks.

There is another thing you need to understand about COBOL and that is that columns 72-80 (if memory serves) are comments. Guess which column that fullstop was in? Yep, column 72m therefore it was commented out and was not seen by the compiler which then brought statement 3 under the control of the if and since its full stop was before column 72, it terminated the if.

How did I see it? My manager was looking at the code for the umpteenth time trying to see something. The printout (yep, thats how COBOL worked back then) was upside down from my perspective and I just noticed that that one line was quite long. My manager pulled out his "fanfold impact printer" character measuring ruler and sure enough it was column 73. We moved the sentence one character to the left and problem solved.

I could go on about many more simple fixes to major problems that I have been involved with that in some cases were mysteries for over a year before they set me on to them.