Comment by ryandrake
2 hours ago
Exactly. Everywhere I've worked had at least 3-4X more bugs than we had capacity to fix, and the bug count grew over time, net of any fixing happening. There was never difficulty finding problems to solve. Unfortunately most places don't give engineering the autonomy to solve critical issues. It's just feature cram and redesigns, over and over, and let the bugs pile up.
The challenge is finding problems that are “worth” solving as a staff engineer. General “bugs” are not staff worthy. Staff need to convince leadership to fix an architectural problem that removes a whole class of bug.
If a bugfix has big impact, even if it’s a one-liner fix, it’s still a staff problem
Sometimes the biggest impact you can make is just changing the spelling of T-E-H to T-H-E on a very visible page. Hopefully that's not a staff level problem in your company.
I get your point. Staff levl engineers should be working on really hard problems that will make a long-term impact, but they often aren't very visible at any one moment. It's only when you look over long-term and you realize that things have slowly gotten better that you realize the impact. At least I hope they've gotten better. I've made some decisions over the years that I wonder if they really made things better or not. And it's really hard to say since there's no control where you can say, well this is what it would have been a different way.