HACKER Q&A
📣 ctxc

Have you directly authored a high-profile massive bug? How does it feel?


I know _everyone_ has been the author of various colorful bugs.

But I keep thinking how the author of the Cloudflare's Rust unwrap code feels right now. Yes, processes should have prevented it and so on, but...have any of you been directly involved in a similar high profile bug?

How does it feel months/years later, do you find yourself thinking about it? Do coworkers know about it, how does your environment change?

  👤 JohnFen Accepted Answer ✓
Yeah, I've been the author of two very high-profile bugs over the decades. It's terrible in the moment, but once the bugs were fixed, I took the lessons learned and moved on. I don't think about them except when I'm telling war stories -- those are two of them.

> Do coworkers know about it, how does your environment change?

You mean my current coworkers or the ones at the time? The ones at the time obviously knew, because the bugs represented crises. My current ones don't, except for the ones I've swapped war stories with.

I'm not sure what you mean by "how does your environment change". It changes in that you learn the lessons the issue teaches you. Otherwise, nothing changes. Or do you mean do other devs look at you in a worse light as a result? No, they don't.

👤 PaulHoule
I was working on one of the biggest open access publishing platforms and the world and under pressure I rolled up an upgrade that wasn't properly tested and then spent about a month trying to make it work before the team gave up, rolled back to an earlier version. I got sidelined and worked on other systems, my contract wasn't renewed and I was looking for a job 8 months later with a really bad attitude.

There was a lot of crazy politics but it turned out that the team was completely reorganized and a lot of people left that year, including my boss and her boss and the head of the organization. It led that platform to confront the sustainability, funding and management issues that had been neglected up until then.

I'm certainly not 100% responsible for what happened but I was probably the only person who could have stopped the disaster but had I done so I probably would have lost my job anyway.