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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

And while 100x might not be true, you KNOW it's a lot more damaging, costly, and disruptive to have to fix a bug that makes it way to production - arguments in favor of testing, canary releases, code reviews, robust programming languages and architectures, etc. They won't stop all issues, but the less that make it to production the better.

That one doesn't take language games or political games, I think. It shouldn't anyway.

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> you KNOW it's a lot more damaging, costly, and disruptive

Maybe. It certainly is more damaging to the ego, but ego is cheap. Bugs are not all created equal and have different costs to fix, and different affects on the business. For example, and architectural mistake will cost a lot to fix and can be exploited by competitors to take customers. A tiny logic error might take 5 minutes to fix, and affect a small number of users and have zero impact on the overall business. There's also tiny bugs that cost a lot (oops decimal in wrong place on bills)...

I don’t disagree with the maybe, because of course some bugs really aren’t that bad. But especially in the case of those architectural bugs, it is incredibly difficult to be confident that the impact of the bug is as limited as you think it is. Additionally, if you couldn’t take the time to fix it in dev, it is also pretty likely that it will live in production for a long time, possibly forever. And these bugs have a habit of prompting code smelly workarounds, interacting with other bugs, and generally making your system harder to reason about.

It could be the right decision to not fix an architectural bug. But it is a gamble, with a very long tail of cost for getting it wrong.

Lots of bugs in production code never get triggered or never get fixed and lots of production code eventually gets deleted. There is a real problem with confirmation bias here, as the bugs that cost weeks to fix in production are extremely memorable, and the bugs you might have thought would be a big deal but never actually had to deal with are nearly invisible.

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