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

The second issue I hear is that you care about your customers, and I think you feel like your company's culture isn't correctly prioritizing quality. There are definitely some steps you can take to improve processing and make these sorts of things less common, but they won't have as big an impact as they could unless everyone "buys in" to them.

Let's talk about the cultural aspect first. You said:

    I have casually asked my boss how they feel about all the random bugs in our product. They feel that as a startup of our size, our number 1 priority is making sure we have enough features. Our prospective customers tell us things like "we can't sign up until you support X number of features," and my boss and the founder believe that our number 1 indication of success is the downward trend of X. I understand what they mean (it doesn't matter how bug-free your code is if you run out of funding and go out of business) but I still feel guilty.

I think you're on the right track here. You're recognizing that the people "above" you in the organization have different motivations, and allowing the possibility that you may just be wrong in how you view this because you are operating with a different perspective on the system as a whole.

That said... "we need to prioritize features over stability" is a huge red flag to me. In my experience it generally means that the people in control of the company are measuring the wrong things; they're prioritizing increasing the effectiveness of your sales funnel by trying to satisfy everyone when they should be either focusing on ARR (annual recurring revenue) by making your existing customers happy or changing their customer acquisition strategy to get potential customers with the "right" problem into the funnel in the first place.

Basically, de-emphasizing stability in order to grow will quickly lead to problems with retention. It's a totally valid choice to do it for short periods, but if you go too far it's very hard to come back.

My boss also is correct when they say that these issues happen less than 1% of the time. I don't feel like I have buy-in to make any changes to this process. Alerts are ignored, and some people don't even have PagerDuty set up, their alerts go nowhere.

    I don't feel like I have buy-in to make any changes to this process. Alerts are ignored, and some people don't even have PagerDuty set up, their alerts go nowhere.

My gut says this is the heart of the issue here. I think you care deeply about the people who use your product, and that you feel like the people around you don't.

If I were you, I would start preparing to leave the company if necessary. Once I was confident that I had a place to go, I'd stretch myself and try to influence the people around me to improve quality and change the focus to sustainable growth. It might work. If not, while it's possible they'd just fire me because of the pushback, it's much more likely that I'd just get to the point where I realized that this wasn't the place for me.

I think this feeling goes away over time as you gain more experience and see how others are doing in the industry. There's a never ending tension between not breaking prod (having bugs) and shipping. In most places, you can't stop shipping, so you have to find how much stability you're willing to sacrifice for your feature work. Then you need to accept the casualties as being part of the battle you're waging. Of course it's better if there's no casualties, and it's better if you minimize the risk of casualties, but if you stick you're nose out there, you need to accept the risk and live with it.

With experience, you can learn ways to minimize the risk you take when you ship, by writing code in better ways, by organizing things with more backstops, handrails, fail-safe patterns, but it's always at the detriment of shipping. But the better you get, the lesser the impact of the safety tax will be.

Why should you feel guilty when the CEO or founders don't feel guilty?

Work is just that: work. Live your life to the fullest. Be proud of what you do at work but don't let work consumes you.

> If it seems like they have less bugs, it's because they do as little as possible with their software as they can get away with

This is tautological; the obvious way to ship fewer bugs is for your software to simply do less so there's a smaller surface area for bugs to happen in the first place. I see this as a good thing and I wish more software companies would take Apple's approach in this regard.