Wish I could understand why, when someone is reporting a really strange problem, I can get 100% puzzled by it and stuck. But then, if I manage to reproduce the same problem, I can always quickly figure out the root cause and fix it.

It's often a night and day difference, I can go round and round with a user for hours trying to understand what they did, but once I reproduce the problem, I can have it fixed in minutes.

It's something to do with bandwidth, and limited information, and communication difficulties, and confirmation bias, and.. I don't know what all.

Being able to diagnose and fix reproducible problems is a good skill. Being able to coax reproducible test cases out of users is a good skill. But I feel there's something here I could be better at.

(Users could also be a lot better at reporting bugs and reliably communicating of course..)