I once came in to work on a Monday to find a 200 email thread from a clique of idiot coworkers who had been feverishly working on a bug over the weekend, only to discover that our locks were fundamentally flawed, though that was at email 50. Around email 52, someone who actually knows how to use a RW lock (and has written research papers on lockless data structures) says, "no, they are fine, you're just doing it wrong, see [link]". The rest of the 150 emails were the idiots talking among themselves learning how locks work, and convincing themselves they now knew how to "work around" the bug (i.e. use the lock correctly).

This is not a thread about idiots, and actually these guys were trying their hardest to be conscientious employees... It was just a noisy and stupid way for several people who should have known better to learn how to do a simple and fundamental part of their job. (The one who falsely diagnosed the bad locking code was a 15 year veteran "senior" engineer. <scoffs>)