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Comment by jaredklewis | Hacker News Reader

Where have you worked where this was practiced if you don’t mind sharing?

I’ve seen very close to bug free backends (more early on in development). But every frontend code base ever just always seems to have a long list of low impact bugs. Weird devices, a11y things, unanticipated screen widths, weird iOS safari quirks and so on.

Also I feel like if this was official policy, many managers would then just start classifying whatever they wanted done as a bug (and the line can be somewhat blurry anyway). So curious if that was an issue that needed dealing with.

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I'm not going to share my employer, but this is exactly how we operate. Bugs first, they show up on the Jira board at the top of the list. If managers would abuse that (they don't), we'd just convert them to stories, lol.

I do agree that it's rare, this is my first workplace where they actually work like that.

Frontend bugs mostly stem from usage of overblown frontend frameworks, that try to abstract from the basics of the web too much. When relying on browser defaults and web standards, proper semantic HTML and sane CSS usage, the scope of things that can go wrong is limited.

It's pretty wild that this is the case now (if it indeed is), given that for a long, long time, sticking to sane, standard stuff was the exact way you'd land in a glitch/compatibility hell. Yes, thanks mostly to IE, but still.

In my experience frontend bugs are usually from over-complicated business logic with layout-issues a distant second.

That requires business logic to run in the frontend in the first place though. One could argue it shouldn't. Anything that is checked in the frontend, needs to be re-checked in the backend anyway, because you cannot trust the frontend, because it is under control of the browser/user.

I worked at various small agile startups around SF. Retired last year.

They weren't big enough to have "official policies". We talked to each other instead.

I did work a few years at big companies twice. That taught me to appreciate the simple life :)

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