Finding and fixing bugs proactively is one of the most underrated ways to accelerate your growth as an engineer. Here are the core points from the lesson:
Great engineers don’t wait for bugs to be assigned—they actively hunt for them through QA reports, user feedback, crash logs, dashboards, and on-call alerts
Proactively surfacing and solving bugs builds trust, reduces last-minute surprises, and makes you a more reliable and promotable team member
Attending SEV (severe incident) reviews, learning from outages, and applying those lessons is a major career hack for fast growth
Engineers can approach bugs at different levels of ownership, from simply reporting them to fully owning the investigation, fix, and communication
Creating scope by finding and fixing high-priority bugs—even without being asked—can dramatically accelerate your career trajectory and reputation