Why You Should Love Bugs

Bugs are often seen as a nuisance, but in reality, they offer one of the highest-impact ways to grow and succeed as an engineer. Here are the core points from the lesson:

• Junior engineers often avoid bugs to chase “cool” feature work, but experienced engineers recognize bugs as critical for making meaningful product impact
• Owning and fixing bugs can accelerate your career growth, even to senior levels like Staff or Senior Staff Engineer, by demonstrating deep technical skill
• Debugging teaches you to dive across teams, codebases, and systems—skills that are rare, valuable, and highly rewarded
• Fixing bugs ensures real, lasting impact compared to feature work, where many experiments and launches often quietly fail
• Mature engineers view the endless supply of bugs as opportunities to create visible, undeniable value by removing problems that directly affect users

Related resources:

• Code quality course: Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer
• Girish Patangay: The billion versions of Facebook you’ve never seen