Ask HN: How do I feel less guilty about bugs? • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by jrochkind1 » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 3:25 PM UTC

askhnthrow74 wrote: post #31

dsr_ wrote: post #7

" a customer recently complain about a bug, which we fixed in a few hours, but the next week they had to complain about the bug again because it was back." Don't feel bad about the bug. Bugs happen. But the company should feel bad about the process that let it come back. Can the process be fixed? That should be top priority.

We have blameless postmortems after major incidents like "the app is completely down." The action items aren't always followed, even easy ones like "new PRs should not use X function, they should instead use Y function." Two days later a PR will be approved and merged that uses X function. So then I'll make a meeting a month later saying "here are all the action items from the last couple postmortems that I don't thi…

Well, I guess your options are:

* Trying to figure out a way to improve processes at your current job. (There might be a way that isn't or doesn't feel like "pushing hard". OR, your current job might just be completely uninterested and this is never going to happen).

* Finding a new job. (The job market is as good for software engineers right now as it ever has been for anyone ever, pretty much)

* Deciding to live with it

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

#92

Post by jrochkind1 » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 3:28 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #75

> We have even had a customer recently complain about a bug, which we fixed in a few hours, but the next week they had to complain about the bug again because it was back. An interaction like this was the genesis of me spending a lot more time trying to understand code via the commit history instead of just looking at what's in front of me. That in turn made me highly opinionated about bad commit hygiene practices. T…

> you're just going to ping-pong between two open bug reports.

I guess you don't have an automated test suite that would prevent you from committing code that causes a previously fixed bug to come back? (Ie, the real meaning of "regression")

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

#93

Post by jbrains » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 9:25 PM UTC

> I feel guilty when our customers have repeated bugginess in our app.

You might be feeling over-responsible for the bugginess in your app. If you did your job perfectly, which forces in the environment around you would still cause you to ship bugs?

In your shoes, I would still want to do everything in my power to limit the bugs that I ship---that's why I practise TDD, for example---but I look carefully for the boundary between what lies within my control/authority and what doesn't, then I refuse responsibility for what doesn't lie within my control/authority. And that was a more-than-a-decade-long change in my mindset.

Not everyone likes TDD; I don't mind. I have a system that helps catch my mistakes sooner, so that I limit the associated damage. I have a very effective system, which I trust, and which therefore allows me to work aggressively: if I can recover from failures inexpensively, then I don't need to agonize over failures. If I drive the cost of failure down close enough to 0, then I don't need as urgently to limit the probability of failure.

What can you do in your work that might help you limit the cost of failure? If you had that, maybe you'd feel less guilty about making mistakes, because you'd done significant work to limit the cost of those mistakes.

Good luck.