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Comment by hammersend | Hacker News Reader

"The flaw is that no one wants to fix anything because fixing things is boring"

I've always thought this was the funniest thing as I relish digging into a piece of open source software that I love to use and fixing little flaws. Just this morning I wrote a patch for guake the drop down terminal that allows the width to be resized on the fly as it was broken on Unity in Ubuntu 12.04. The sense of accomplishment at taking a piece of broken software and making it "right" is phenomenal for me. I guess different strokes for different folks.

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Thanks for fixing that bug! It was really irritating. I guess I should try out guake again.

When your job is on the line due to stack ranking your opinion may change.

From what I've read Valve's use of stack ranking is for compensation bonuses only, not about who to fire.

That's what they say, but what do you think really happens when you are consistently rated lower than your peers?

You get paid less than you deserve but still more than you would get in most other less profitable firms? No one wants to fire the guy who takes out the garbage every day, literally or metaphorically.

When times are tough the guy who does the most menial tasks gets fired first and replaced with someone cheaper.

The thing about being the guy who fixes software, is that no one will hear about it if you are doing a good job at it.

I don't buy it. That's not what I've seen.

If you're fixing software, you're either fixing your own bugs or someone else's bugs. There's bug tracking software; these metrics are visible. If you're fixing your own code, you're also adding functionality (presumably you wrote the code you're fixing). If you're helping to fix other people's code, they will notice. People talk.

I've personally seen almost an entire team disbanded, the work outsourced. The people kept? The guys who fixed things, who made sure it shipped at the end.

You can see bug fixes on a tracker sure. But how many lines of code is that going to be compared to a new feature or game?

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