I'm going to share an experience I've had that I think is applicable: A few years ago, I was tasked with rewriting a number of "packages" (they were essentially HTML forms in a pretty specific domain). The code was really messy and often left me face palming that anyone would ever think to do it that way. I think I even kept a few code snippets because they were so unfathomably backwards I laughed out loud once I understood what it was doing. Needless to say, there were in dire need of being rewritten.
Over the course of approximately a year, my team and I were able to rewrite all of the ones the product owner cared about. We went from having bugs that took hours to troubleshoot to having bugs that generally took minutes to troubleshoot. The general complexity of the bugs we encountered was significantly reduced.
While I totally admit that designing the new packages and figuring out how we were going to tackle this major rewrite was much more engaging and fun, the business really benefits from the significantly cleaner code. I don't claim to have done it perfectly. There are tons of things I never had time to do and many bugs logged against these new packages, but the time it takes to fix these bugs (and thus the money the business spends on these packages) is the big win here.
In light of that, I will say that I do agree with you that the more challenging problems are more engaging and (sometimes) more fun. But if that's what the majority of the bugs you encounter are, there might be larger issues to address that could save you significant time in the long run. But my view on this is likely biased by my experience. I've never done contract work. I've only worked for businesses that already have large software offerings that have been around for years. Perhaps my experience has narrowed my view on this.
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I'm going to share an experience I've had that I think is applicable: A few years ago, I was tasked with rewriting a number of "packages" (they were essentially HTML forms in a pretty specific domain). The code was really messy and often left me face palming that anyone would ever think to do it that way. I think I even kept a few code snippets because they were so unfathomably backwards I laughed out loud once I understood what it was doing. Needless to say, there were in dire need of being rewritten.
Over the course of approximately a year, my team and I were able to rewrite all of the ones the product owner cared about. We went from having bugs that took hours to troubleshoot to having bugs that generally took minutes to troubleshoot. The general complexity of the bugs we encountered was significantly reduced.
While I totally admit that designing the new packages and figuring out how we were going to tackle this major rewrite was much more engaging and fun, the business really benefits from the significantly cleaner code. I don't claim to have done it perfectly. There are tons of things I never had time to do and many bugs logged against these new packages, but the time it takes to fix these bugs (and thus the money the business spends on these packages) is the big win here.
In light of that, I will say that I do agree with you that the more challenging problems are more engaging and (sometimes) more fun. But if that's what the majority of the bugs you encounter are, there might be larger issues to address that could save you significant time in the long run. But my view on this is likely biased by my experience. I've never done contract work. I've only worked for businesses that already have large software offerings that have been around for years. Perhaps my experience has narrowed my view on this.
Also, thanks for commenting!