As Andrew Hunt and David Thomas wrote in
The Pragmatic Programmer:
Tip 26: "select" Isn't Broken.
We worked on a project where a senior engineer was convinced that the select system call was broken on Solaris. NO amount of persuasion or logic could change his mind (the fact that every other networking application on the box worked fine was irrelevant). He spent weeks writing work-arounds, which, for some odd reason, didn't seem to fix the problem. When finally forced to sit down and read the documentation on select, he discovered the problem and corrected it in a matter of minutes. We now use the phrase "select is broken" as a gentle reminder whenever one of us starts blaming the system for a fault that is likely to be our own.