Why Companies Don’t Fix Bugs

Comments

• Endmaker@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  TLDR: it doesn’t make (or save) money for companies in the short-term.

  source

  • Strider@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Not only this, but also ‘agile’.

    source
  • CosmoNova@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    There‘s also the aspect of dark patterns that make up a huge bulk of Enshittification. They‘re making their software worse and let you jump through hoops simply to get you to spend more time and money on it. A lot of those hoops very much feel and probably sometimes are just bugs or inefficiencies.

    source
• chrisbtoo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  This is something I really love about my job. It’s a small company, and we don’t have any of these kinds of process overheads.

  It’s accepted that people fuck up (and in most cases that’re relevant to me, I’m the people in question) but if I can reproduce the problem, I can often get the fix in the users’ hands the next day. Generally the positive effects of a quick turnaround and feeling like they matter outweigh the negatives of the problem being there in the first place.

  Not to say I don’t have stuff in the “tech debt” bucket, but having the autonomy to just fix the low-hanging fruit makes for a satisfying work environment.

  source
• BradleyUffner@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  At a previous company, I got in trouble for fixing a bug because the company made a significant portion of their revenue from paid customer support fixing data related to the bug.

  source

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Wow… that sounds like a whistleblower type situation. Unfortunately, whistleblowing doesn’t pay the bills…

    source

    • arararagi@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Not every whistleblower reveals their identity, just needs some proof and a good journalist.

      source
    • ulterno@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Unless you have what it takes to be a celebrity

      source
• pHr34kY@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Every company I worked for is like this. I sneak small improvements into daily work. If I call an old function, I’ll often fix it while I’m there. Don’t raise tickets. Don’t ask. Just fix it.

  I also have a shelf of a hundred fixes that I never merged. I’ve done the work, but the real hurdle is PR and and testing. It takes days of effort to push code that took an hour to write.

  source

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Exactly! I have the same, and sometimes I’ll sneak in some fixes I have pending when I get the time to properly test it (usually in a boring meeting).

    source
  • sfxrlz@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I’ve had whole projects falter because they wouldn’t get tested and a year later it was too much effort to reintegrate into the system which had moved on significantly…

    source
• BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  It’s a big company problem. Here’s why even obvious bugs like this one slip through the cracks: 

  1. The Tyranny of “Requirements”
     In large organizations, everything revolves around the roadmap. If a bug fix isn’t tied to a specific requirement or feature, it gets labeled as “tech debt” and shoved to the bottom of the backlog. And let’s be honest: “tech debt” is corporate-speak for “we’ll deal with this never.”

  2. The Rotating Door of Ownership
     Over eight years, developers and product managers come and go. The person who originally filed the ticket? Long gone. The person who understood the issue? Moved on to another project. Institutional memory fades, and the ticket becomes a relic of the past. Even if the problem is still very much alive. 

  3. The Myth of “Quick Fixes”
     A 13-line patch might seem trivial, but in a legacy codebase, even small changes can have unintended consequences. Without proper tests or documentation, developers are often hesitant to touch old code. The risk of breaking something far outweighs the reward of fixing a non-critical bug. 

  4. The Invisible ROI
     Let’s be real: improving load times doesn’t directly impact the bottom line. Selling Shark Cards (GTA’s virtual currency) does. Companies optimize for metrics that show up on quarterly earnings calls, not for goodwill or user experience, until it’s too late.

  source

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    As a lead, I’ve recently started finding time to make progress on a lot of this, because a lot of the stuff I’ve seen over the years has just never been prioritized. Over the last few weeks I have:

    • dramatically reduced load time for a resource our support team uses
    • significantly cut resource wastage for devs on a handful of our microservices, with one small change
    • fixed a huge gap in test coverage on code that’s >5 years old, and fixed a couple bugs at the same time
    • cleaned up a bunch of small tech debt nonsense

    You can do this as well. The problem is that I don’t get any recognition for it, so this is completely driven by me making time for it and slipping it in w/ other changes. I document the more important ones, but I’m taking a risk w/ these fixes since any bugs I create in the process will not look good.

    Whenever someone else on the team does something like this and is keeping up w/ their work, I try to lavish praise on them in the hopes that maybe they’ll do it again.

    source

    • nulluser@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Whenever the topic comes up with leadership, I try to explain it in financial terms.

      Tech debt is just like financial debt. There are times when its appropriate and necessary to take on some debt. But debt accumulates interest charges. If just keep building up more debt without ever paying it down, it’ll eventually bankrupt the company.

      The engineering team doesn’t always know when the finance team is accumulating debt or paying it back, but we trust that they are doing so appropriately.

      You don’t always know when the engineering team is accumulating or paying off debt, but you need to trust that when we say we need time to to pay down tech debt, we’re serious. We’ll all be out of a job if we don’t.

      They don’t usually like to hear it, but when put in those terms, they don’t have an argument against it. I’m sure if we could provide a statement showing we had $478,562.78 in tech debt at 4.75%, they’d be more understanding about paying it down.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
  • superkret@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    improving load times doesn’t directly impact the bottom line

    Depends. In an online store earning $50,000 a day, a one-second delay adds up to more than $1 million in lost sales each year.
    www.bigcommerce.com/glossary/page-load/

    source

    • SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      I never got into GTA Online because I couldn’t stand the long load times. So they probably lost a shit ton of potential customers.

      source
• Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  It was about the time when that fix was first being reported on that it became obvious to me that big companies don’t fix every single bug because they just don’t have the time. The dude actually doing the work might know how to fix a thing, but never tasked to do so because someone above them thought their time would be better spent on something else.

  Meanwhile, a game made by a single dude in his free time could fix every random bug reported to them just because they don’t necessarily have to prioritize anything else.

  source

  • RebekahWSD@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I love game made by a single dude fixing bugs! I play Wazhack, and have sent bug reports to the single dude and gotten replies and clarification requests and its always cool as hell!

    source

    • echodot@feddit.uk ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      As long as the code is well written, I actually find fixing bugs more satisfying than I would have writing the original code.

      source
• ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I too have been in the inside and I was one of those types who fought to do the right thing. The reason was much more simple to understand than this article…companies are run by sociopaths, psychopaths, Narcissists and doing the right thing is not their motivation. That said, while it might be easy to point the finger at them, they only get their power as soon as many kiss their ass and accept the wrong. You know…sort of like what is happening in the USA and most other country’s. We have a massive problem and we are not even really talking about it. Instead some want to blame capitalism and while sure it is part of the problem, you better believe and centralized human group has and will suffer from the same issues to varying degrees.

  source

  • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I dunno about the power part. They control the money. And they work with thier counterparts at other companies to make sure they continue to control the money. I too spoke out about doing the right thing to the PMs. My boss told me to knock it off because the leadership controls my pay, and they listen to the PM.

    source
• Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I always tell perspective employers that I don’t want to be management. I care too much for the user. And I tell current employers that they don’t want me in charge of priorities, because I prioritize tech debt.

  source

  • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I’m a manager. I prioritize tech debt by lying to my stakeholders. The only downside is they don’t appreciate the cause of our stability. But it’s the right decision for the company.

    source
• MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  How come a small company has more leeway to afford such things than a big one with more money?

  No, don’t answer. I know already, that small to medium companies are the better work place.

  source
• JeremyHuntQW12@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  1-money 2-incompetence 3-the senior prgrammer left somewhere and is uncontactable, or was sacked by a powertripping manager with the IQ of a cinder block and no one can work out what the hell they wrote.

  source

  • echodot@feddit.uk ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    If you work at an old enough company the answer is usually 4, whoever wrote the code is long since dead and no one these days knows anything about COBOL.

    Until about 4 years ago we still had a dot matrix printer.

    source