Accelerate your software engineering career by fixing something every week.

We, software engineers, are so used to living in pain that we stopped noticing it. We die a death by a thousand papercuts every day only to start fresh the next day. Flaky tests, broken builds, workarounds, outdated documentation is our daily bread. We live with all of that forgetting how much it costs.

Imagine an annoying issue you need to spend a few minutes on every week. Now, multiply this time by the number of people on your team – likely, they all are facing this issue. I also bet this is not the only “small” issue you and your team have. If you add all this up it may turn out that your team could use another engineer whose full-time job is just to deal with all these annoyances.

With time, it only gets worse because small issues tend to grow. One flaky test leads to a flaky suite and soon no one can tell what the quality of the product is. A convoluted function is patched multiple times without anyone really understanding it to the point when everyone prays that they don’t have to touch it. Missing test coverage results in multiple bugs reported by users.

The interesting thing is – most small issues don’t take a lot of time to fix. You yourself (i.e., not counting your team) may be able to recoup the time invested in a couple of weeks.

There are many examples of the positive impact of taking care of a small issue. Here is just a handful examples from my experience:

• Fixing an acknowledged bug deprioritized consistently from release to release made lives of some users better (and discussing the bug repeatedly took more time than just fixing it)
• Refactoring code that was incomprehensible made adding a new feature easier and faster
• Updating an internal wiki helped save time spent on answering the same question again and again
• A “flaky” test was a result of a product bug that could have serious consequences
• Tuning a noisy alert prevented from waking up a team member who was on-call in the middle of the night

But wait, there is more! If you keep doing this regularly (a weekly cadence worked best for me) people will notice. Your team members may even start doing the same! And if they don’t, it will at least make it harder for them to make things worse – for example, it is much easier to ignore a new failing test if tens of tests are already failing than to ignore the first failing test in a suite. In any case, you are now helping to strengthen the engineering culture of your team leading by example.

And what if no one notices? Oh well, you made at least the life better for yourself – and this is already a win!