Why Companies Don't Fix Bugs

Personally I've never found it a problem to just fix things that I see are broken, as a dev, without PM approval, even in very dysfunctional organizations. Sometimes it even goes noticed and people applaud you for it.

In other words: though I acknowledge that the phenomenon described in the article is real, I sometimes feel it's just because developers accept a reality that doesn't need to be accepted.

But fixing a bug requires time from your side (mainly doing the investigation) and from others (code reviews). So if the whole team is working on an “important” epic (this is, one with a deadline, like any other epic) and you come out of the blue with a bugfix unrelated to the epic without telling anyone: well, that’s weird isn’t it? Your EM/PM will ask you why you didn’t prioritise the epic’s tasks, and your colleagues could say that they cannot switch their focus or gather time for reviewing your fix (more so that it’s something that the EM/PM hasn’t approved).

So unless you are overworking (e.g., you work in your jira tasks AND on top of that you fix bugs) I don’t see it.

I would love to work on things that make sense like stabilising the system and all, but I work on whatever sells or whatever the EM/PM wants. These days unfortunately, shipping >>> fixing.

In my (albeit limited) experience, there's slack in the workweek, and that slack can provide the required time to do random stuff.

I recognize this isn't true in organizations where everything is micromanaged, work time is tracked in hours or even minutes, and autonomy doesn't exist.

The more the employees are treated like responsible professionals, the more this is possible. And conversely, the more they're like factory workers behind a conveyor belt, the less this is possible.

It's also not true in organizations where headcount has been pared back to the very bones, so that everything is crunch time, all the time.