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Ask HN: How do I feel less guilty about bugs?

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Re: Ask HN: How do I feel less guilty about bugs?

#11

Post by fsociety »

Blameless company culture can help on this a lot. FB had “move fast and break things” so people would not feel bad about breaking things and instead would focus on fixing them. Other companies may have improved versions of this culture.

Think of this in contrast to working at a place where, if there is a production bug the lead’s first instinct once finding said bug is to git blame who did it.

Leadership should be encouraging breakages as long as there is a review of the bug, remediation, and a fix put in place to prevent it from happening again. That should be rewarded in any performance reviews.

Re: Ask HN: How do I feel less guilty about bugs?

#12

Post by digisign »

Stop feeling guilty and start writing/improving a test suite. Start using linters and set up a CI pipeline. Don't ask permission, just do it in between tasks. If management is at all competent they will see you as promotional material in the medium term.

There's a classic Joel on Software post where he talks about making workflow changes as a grunt. An important point is that you want to get your daily work done first:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/25/getting-things-don...

"… I also knew that making a good first impression was crucial. So I allocated the first seven hours of every day to just writing code, as was expected of me. There’s nothing like a flurry of checkins to make you look good to the rest of the development team. But I reserved another hour every afternoon before going home to improving the process. I used that time to fix things that made it hard to debug our product. I set up a daily build and a bug database. I fixed all the longstanding annoyances that made development difficult… Slowly, the process got better and better."

Re: Ask HN: How do I feel less guilty about bugs?

#13

Post by animal_spirits »

> The wise programmer is told about Tao and follows it. The average programmer is told about Tao and searches for it. The foolish programmer is told about Tao and laughs at it. If it were not for laughter, there would be no Tao. The highest sounds are hardest to hear. Going forward is a way to retreat. Great talent shows itself late in life. Even a perfect program still has bugs.

- The Tao of Programming: https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html

Re: Ask HN: How do I feel less guilty about bugs?

#15

Post by throwawayboise »

There is no software without bugs.

I had a Google spreadsheet that I put together two weeks ago. Used some custom code in "App Script", a few very simple functions that made some of the spreadsheet formulas much easier.

A week later they stopped working. Google app script was just not working for a lot of people. It could have been embarrasing because I had shared this spreadsheet with several hundred people to communicate some real-time information, and now it was not working. But, that's software. It always lets you down eventually, and never at a convenient time.

Here's the specific issue, still unresolved after many days. This is Google. Google. If their software is buggy, what hope does your small startup have?

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/222342097

It's part of the reason that I hope to as much as possible evict computers, phones, and the internet from my life when I retire. I feel like Charlie Brown kicking the football over and over, thinking that this time she won't pull the ball away.

Re: Ask HN: How do I feel less guilty about bugs?

#16

Post by ztestz »

long term, customers vote with their time/money - there will always be bugs, but in general if the software is good enough to warrant the time/money they will keep using it

short term, I used to feel this way as well and would try to figure out how to fix all the things, just to realize it cannot be done. Not to pass the buck but it's the person above you whom probably has more information about whether or not these bugs are going to sink the ship, if the company needs to create less bugs someone will need to prioritize ways to prevent them

Re: Ask HN: How do I feel less guilty about bugs?

#17

Post by swframe2 »

1) don't learn from your mistakes; learn not to make mistakes. Look at what others have done; there are a lot of blogs about what when wrong with similar products; make sure you don't repeat other people's mistakes. Take a hard and deep look at the failures to identify and fix the structural reasons they happen

2) increase the effort you spend on tests; write less code; implement simpler features; code review every change. Don't listen to anyone who tells you it is ok to test less; do what will make the company the most money long term; it is better to work somewhere else than to work for someone who doesn't care about product quality. Alpha/Beta test more.

3) implement a checkpoint/rollback system (using git can save you effort) Save config changes to a temp location so it is never lost. Allow test configs to be validated and then allow the user to roll out the new config gradually. Save the old config so users can rollback easily. Implement a monitoring system that can auto detect failed rollouts and trigger rollbacks.

Re: Ask HN: How do I feel less guilty about bugs?

#18

Post by bo1024 »

Even at the startup you’re a cog in the machine. Your boss decides how you spend your time. If some of that time is on preventing bugs, and there are things you can do to get better at preventing bugs? Do those things. The rest is not in your control.

Unfortunately the extent to which we can take professional pride in our work is limited by priorities above our pay grade.

Re: Ask HN: How do I feel less guilty about bugs?

#19

Post by vlunkr »

wintorez wrote: post #5

Breathe. It's just software, we're not saving babies here. https://www.hanselman.com/blog/software-and-saving-babies

Some people write software that saves (or can take) lives. Don't take one of those jobs if you're stressed about bugs in your web app.

Re: Ask HN: How do I feel less guilty about bugs?

#20

Post by tacostakohashi »

You should step back and see the big picture.

1) they don't have to use your software. they could write their own, or choose another vendor, or do whatever your software automates manually. if they are using your software, they have chosen that option because, on balance, it meets their needs. that's not to say it's perfect, but it must do more right than it does wrong.

> For example they might spend an hour working on a task and then suddenly our code runs into an exception and their data is not saved properly.

Nobody should ever do this! Spending an hour working on unsaved work is not sensible. Either your software should save it along the way, or they should do their work in some other place (notepad?) that saves it incrementally, then copy and paste it in as a last step.

This is an example of where you need to step back and see the whole picture - it shouldn't be a case of doing unsaved work for 1 hour then saving with 100% reliability, it should save incrementally. Even if the save code were 100% reliable, they would still lose their work if they lose power, have a network disconnect, etc.

Unless you step back and understand why they are choosing your application, despite these problems, you won't be able to see the most important aspects of the business.

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