2025-01-14
My bug reports are mostly done for work these days
These days, I almost entirely report bugs in open source software as part of my work. A significant part of this is that most of what I stumble over bugs in are things that work uses (such as Ubuntu or OpenBSD), or at least things that I mostly use as part of work. There are some consequences of this that I feel like noting today.
The first is that I do bug investigation and bug reporting on work time during work hours, and I don't work on "work bugs" outside of that, on evenings, weekends, and holidays. This sometimes meshes awkwardly with the time open source projects have available for dealing with bugs (which is often in people's personal time outside of work hours), so sometimes I will reply to things and do additional followup investigation out of hours to keep a bug report moving along, but I mostly avoid it. Certainly the initial investigation and filing of a work bug is a working hours activity.
(I'm not always successful in keeping it to that because there is always the temptation to spend a few more minutes digging a bit more into the problem. This is especially acute when working from home.)
The second thing is that bug filing work is merely one of the claims on my work time. I have a finite amount of work time and a variety of things to get done with varying urgency, and filing and updating bugs is not always the top of the list. And just like other work activity, filing a particular bug has to convince me that it's worth spending some of my limited work time on this particular activity. Work does not pay me to file bugs and make open source better; they pay me to make our stuff work. Sometimes filing a bug is a good way to do this but some of the time it's not, for example because the organization in question doesn't respond to most bug reports.
(Even when it's useful in general to file a bug report because it will result in the issue being fixed at some point in the future, we generally need to deal with the problem today, so filing the bug report may take a back seat to things like developing workarounds.)
Another consequence is that it's much easier for me to make informal Fediverse posts about bugs (often as I discover more and more disconcerting things) or write Wandering Thoughts posts about work bugs than it is to make an actual bug report. Writing for Wandering Thoughts is a personal thing that I do outside of work hours, although I write about stuff from work (and I can often use something to write about, so interesting work bugs are good grist).
(There is also that making bug reports is not necessarily pleasant, and making bad bug reports can be bad. This interacts unpleasantly with the open source valorization of public work. To be blunt, I'm more willing to do unpleasant things when work is paying me than when it's not, although often the bug reports that are unpleasant to make are also the ones that aren't very useful to make.)
PS: All of this leads to a surprisingly common pattern where I'll spend much of a work day running down a bug to the point where I feel I understand it reasonably well, come home after work, write the bug up as a Wandering Thoughts entry (often clarifying my understanding of the bug in the process), and then file a bug report at work the next work day.