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

If you can't convince them, please don't kill yourself over it. Remember that its just a job. Things break in business processes all the time. The best organizations have a good process to prioritize fixing such issues and ensuring that they happen less frequently. But single handedly trying to change your org is difficult if you don't have the backing of someone powerful.

In the event of a crash, they are likely able to choose to either start over and drop the last 4 hours of work, or to load state from autosave-20220507.1300.xml and retrace their steps from the last 5 minutes. Or improve your logging until it's user-accessible, with the goal of giving them access to a file they can read and figure out how to reproduce the crash (and avoid those circumstances in the future) or send to you to help debugging.

Absolutely give them an API: Your customers are literally offering to help you do your job for you! If you can swing it so their plugins run serverside and you have a license to the macros they're building, you'll soon see exactly what they need and be able to anticipate those features for other customers. If your product requires special features and you're being told by your customers that they can't convince management to buy it until it supports feature Z, give them the tools to build feature Z so the answer to "Can you integrate with our ERP?" is not "we could add that feature after we finish integrating with our other customer's ERP, talk to you again in 3 weeks" but "Does that ERP support XML? JSON? CSV? SQL? Sockets? Regardless, we can help you write a simple plugin to accommodate whatever specific needs you might have."

I’m reading this as a pattern of prospective customers asking for more features, and the downward trend being that of the number of “missing” features.

As your installed base grows, the number of features supported and requested will tend to grow faster than the number of users grows. Users will always want more features. Even if you support 3 ways of doing the same thing, users will want more ways of doing it, ways that better fit their in-house work flow, or the work flow of some other software they have used elsewhere or in the past.

Your boss and the founder are in growth mode. They want more users and want more features to get more users, of course. But, at some point, the number of features and the number of interactions of those features will start to become a burden on the company, unless it is successful beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, and can afford to hire faster than the burden grows.

You, and your boss and the founder, should start thinking about a future time when you can feel that the product is nearly feature-complete, and thinking about what the natural limits of its feature set might be. If you start that now, you have a chance of having a coherent set of features in a supportable whole.

While maybe it's not sustainable, or maybe it doesn't work for large companies, if you're at a startup or small company, conscientiousness absolutely plays a large role. That's not to say that process cannot help reduce the mental burden of developing though by reducing the need to be conscientious.