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.
> In my (albeit limited) experience, there's slack in the workweek, and that slack can provide the required time to do random stuff.
How do you incentivise developers to put that slack to good use? In my experience, without an incentive, culture slowly rots to the point where the majority of developers simply don't.
It's extremely dysfunctional to micromanage devs to the extent that they can't take a bit of time to fix a bug without getting permission from someone. Unfortunately, a majority of companies in the industry are extremely dysfunctional.
This requires a lot of passion and motivation from individual developers within the company. Of all things they could be slacking off with during a pointless video call, they have to choose to spend than time doing thankless bug fixing.
This is a good way to introduce regressions, particularly if you don't have the QA resources to do full regression testing each release and lack automated test coverage.
I don't say this to scold you, but I think most of us should keep in mind that even simple code changes incur risk and add testing requirements.
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.