I thought mental disengagement was the answer to a job I don’t like. I was wrong.
December last year, I noticed a bug in our product: a text with a color too light that’s barely visible even to sighted users. I took a screenshot and asked the team if it had been flagged. Nobody replied. I didn’t follow up and it soon slipped my mind.
Truth be told, for a long time since I joined, I didn’t care about the product. As someone who hates ads but has to work on it, I coped with the cognitive dissonance through detachment. Detaching myself from the work, I thought, would preserve my moral integrity. My participation would be excused by passive resistance. If it’s ugly, it’s always been ugly. If there’s a bug, well, I don’t own that surface, so that’s none of my business.
Four months later, the bug finally got fixed. For four months, the bug was right there live in production for billions of people. When I delivered the news to the team, I didn’t feel relieved or celebratory. For the most part, I felt ashamed and embarrassed. Being among the first who spotted the bug, I didn’t do anything about it. It was another engineer who saw the bug around the same time and reported it, although it didn’t get picked up until much later.
Could I have been the person who filed the bug? Yes. Could I have chased down engineers to have it fixed a little bit earlier than it was? Maybe. The fact that I could have done something about it but didn’t pained me. It happened under my watch, so it was partly on me. Not caring, I learned, is almost as exhausting and costly as care being wasted.
Yes, it’s a small thing. A tiny nuisance that users probably didn’t notice. A negligible bug that certainly didn’t tank the metrics. However, it mattered to me. “Design is how I see the world and how I want to live my life,” turning a blind eye to the visible wrongs will be akin to denying a part of myself.
Since then, I decided to care. I was the first to report bugs when I spotted one. I started a spreadsheet to track all the paper cuts. I worked horizontally to find paths for quality fixes in different projects. I tried to be as responsive and helpful as possible for my engineers so they were more likely to return the favor when I nudged them for polish.
Magically, the bias to action alone improved my mental health by a long shot. It felt good to care about something and put myself into it. Being in motion, I found, was much healthier than sitting around complaining. I knew the outcome was out of my control and I didn’t expect everything to be fixed, but at least now I could go to sleep every night knowing that I tried.