Fixing bugs is part of the job. If you care about the product you work on, you have to fix the bugs and not whine about who originally wrote the code.
I don't care about the products I work on. I don't own the product, I don't work for an NGO willing to change the world and the product would probably won't revolutionize the industry.
The product's only purpose is to make some people rich. And I don't care for it.
What I care about is being paid, learning, advancing my career and not being bored to death while I work.
So I do quality work because of that. I don't enjoy fixing bugs (some people do), so if I can avoid fixing bugs, I'm happier. I also try to ship as least bugs as possible and I test my code before pushing it. The code has to pass an QA cycle so I will fix my bugs if any. But if some bug is coming from production I'd rather pass on it and take on a feature instead.
As an example fixing trivial styling, dead links, documentation, flaky tests. Work that is important and has to be done, but not something to drown yourself in. Sometimes it's also better to try to solve the root causes, like use css variables, introduce swagger or a more reliable test framework. You want the engineer who codes themselves out of the job of trivial tickets.
The argument was that you'll have less bugs if you use these technologies after all. And I have to agree wrt styling inconsistencies and css variables at least. They're extremely good at standardizing design without getting in the way of the developer
You will always have bugs. The best engineers can solve the hardest bugs
Which is a damn shame for our industry, fixing bugs should be a good career path.
I do believe they should be princely rewarded and I would hope there would be more of these people as this will allow us the people who enjoy building concentrate on it.
I believe there was a thread on HN two days ago of a guy who enjoys fixing bugs asking how he can make a business out of it. Chapeau to him!
That's essentially what I do. Sometimes bugs are quite mentally demanding to resolve, but a couple weeks of that begins to get really draining, so I try and move onto something more on the implementation side for a bit.