Why Companies Don't Fix Bugs

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Incentives and Product Priorities

  • Many comments tie unfixed bugs to incentives: orgs reward shipping new features and revenue growth, not maintenance.
  • When Product fully dominates Engineering, developer time gets allocated to “needle‑moving” features rather than quality or craft.
  • Support/maintenance frequently gets pushed to separate teams with less prestige and power, creating resentment and a “clean‑up crew” dynamic.

Business Calculus of Bugs

  • Bugs are often tolerated if they don’t visibly affect short‑ or medium‑term revenue, especially in enterprise/B2B where buyers optimize for checklists and price.
  • Known bugs can even be a perverse sales tool: users may buy the next major version hoping it finally fixes long‑standing issues.
  • Some dispute the claim that performance doesn’t affect revenue, arguing load times (e.g., GTA) directly impact engagement and spending.

Types of Bugs and Technical Constraints

  • “Load‑bearing bugs” and long‑lived quirks become de facto behavior; fixing them risks breaking workflows and integrations.
  • Rare, hard‑to‑reproduce issues, vague reports, or bugs tied to external dependencies (AV, OS quirks, app store processes) are especially likely to languish.
  • Legacy systems and outsourced or hollowed‑out dev teams can make even simple fixes prohibitively expensive, pushing vendors toward rewrites instead.

Organization, Ownership, and Culture

  • Rapid churn of owners and teams means no one wants to take responsibility for non‑glamorous bug work.
  • Some argue devs should “just fix things” in the slack of the week; others describe environments where even trivial fixes require PM approval and are discouraged.
  • Suggested mitigations include “firebreak”/bug‑blitz sprints, rotation of engineers through support, and shared responsibility models rather than siloed support orgs.

Process and Methodology

  • Time‑boxed Agile/Scrum is criticized for rewarding “nearly right on time” over “right but slower,” encouraging subtle, long‑lived bugs.
  • Overpacked sprints and perpetual deadline mode remove the slack needed for opportunistic bug fixing.

User Experience and Trust

  • Users report deep frustration with long‑standing “paper cut” bugs (e.g., Discord key behavior) that are ignored unless they can rally enough public votes.
  • Several note a broader shift from trust and quality as core values to investor‑driven metrics, reinforcing the pattern of unfixed bugs.