alt Hacker NewsEx-Meta employee here. I worked at reality labs, perhaps in other orgs the situation is different.
At Meta we did "fix-it weeks", more or less every quarter. At the beginning I was thrilled: leadership that actually cares about fixing bugs!
Then reality hit: it's the worst possible decision for code and software quality. Basically this turned into: you are allowed to land all the possible crap you want. Then you have one week to "fix all the bugs". Guess what: most of the time we couldn't even fix a single bug because we were drown in tech debt.
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Reminds me of ids policy of "As soon as you see a bug, you fix it"
"...if you don't fix your bugs your new code will be built on buggy code and ensure an unstable foundation and if you check in buggy code someone else is going to be writing code based on your bad code and well you know you can imagine how wasteful that's going to be"
16:22 of "The Early Days of id Software: Programming Principles" by John Romero (Strange Loop 2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzqdZAYcwfY&t=982s
From the post:
> That’s not to say we don’t fix important bugs during regular work; we absolutely do. But fixits recognize that there should be a place for handling the “this is slightly annoying but never quite urgent enough” class of problems.
So in their case, fixit week is mostly about smaller bugs, quality of life improvements and developer experience.
I agree completely. Also it gives mental excuse to not fix bugs now and leave it for the upcoming bug fix week. Specially if there's any kind of celebration of what was achieved during bug fix week.
It's also patronizing to the devs. "Internal survey shows devs complain about software quality, let's give them a week every quarter and the other 11 we do whatever we want". What needs to change here is leadership being honest about business, as sometimes fixing bugs is simply not important. Sure sure it depends on the bug... I am talking about when devs complain about having a huge number of bugs in the backlog (most of them low impact) or whatever something that only affects a small percentage. Another strategy here would be to properly surface the impact of said bugs to users / customers... until you do this, nobody has a reason to care.
In practice if you really care about fixing bugs/cleaning things up the thing that works best is sneaking that into feature work somehow.
My experience at Meta is that those weeks are spent not fixing bugs but working on refactors which increase your LOC and diff count. Many of the tasks engs work on are ones they themselves created months previously as "todos".
I question my life a lot when I'm reviewing code which appears to have been written incorrectly at first so that the author can land a follow up diff with the "fix"