Accelerate your career by just fixing software bugs

In software, accelerating careers are usually attributed to big fancy projects and greenfield projects, but there is a better and guaranteed way.

Fancy projects don’t come by often, take a long time to get delivered, and do have high chances of failure. Such projects also depend on many teams and people. This means that your success and growth largely depend on so many people other than you.

Instead, there is an easier guaranteed way of career growth that many engineers completely ignore. Fixing bugs.

Why fixing bugs is a guarantee for growth

I am just going to address why there is a guarantee.

100% of the companies have it all the time, there is an eternal flow of it - no waiting for it. There is hardly any contention for this type of work. You would touch a really a wide variety of systems across the company to fix these bugs and hence accelerating your learning. Bug fixing continuously improves your analytics skills unlike fancy projects where the designs are done upfront and there is a long and mundane execution phase. No deadlines for most bug fixes and hence less stress.

Now that I convinced you that bugs are good for your personal learning. If you want to adopt this strategy, here is what you need to do.

Go for volume and variety

Aim to fix at least 5x more bugs than the average engineer. You will start bubbling up invisibility. Touch a wide variety of bugs and systems so that you will engage with engineers across many teams. In doing so, people will know you by your name. You will start being considered a ‘domain expert’ relatively quickly.

Package your communications

Fixing a complicated bug that saved the company five million dollars deserves individual communication. However, for all other bugs, send a monthly or a weekly. State that you have fixed 30 bugs in categories A, B, and C in your communications to the stakeholders.

The mundane “fixed a bug” email instantly turns into almost a clickbait email of “30 bugs fixed last month” - people will take notice and you will be rewarded for it.