[NotAWorkNick]

Why is it something that you feel needs fixing? Caring deeply about something you care about is a good thing, it shows pride in your work/craft. Sure, nothing and nobody is ever 100% perfect 100% of the time but none the less I can assure you that people in other fields often feel the same way about the same things (bugs, faults, design errors, something missed in an audit etc).

In my opinion you are showing the attributes of a great employee and with your attitude I would hire someone like yourself in a heartbeat.

I have come across both those that care deeply and those that shrug off errors as 'meh, shit happens' and I can honestly state that the good ones cared while the ones that had the 'shrug - so what' attitudes were mediocre (at best). In one of my more uncharitable and judgemental moments it struck me that their attitude of not caring was because they had so much prior practice at dealing with shit-that-went-wrong issues that it was nothing new.

[askhnthrow74]

The reason I think it needs fixing (and the reason I created this thread) is because _I know_ every product has bugs.

Suppose I invited you to a party and I gave you directions but they were so bad you were lost for an hour. I would feel bad about that, even if you enjoyed the party. But that's just one person. If I discover a bug that causes one user each month to lose an hour of work, I'd feel bad and try to get the team to fix it. And then I find out in a couple months that because we have more users it's now affecting 100 people? I can't keep feeling guilty forever.

So I'm sort of asking how do I make peace with that and maybe even feel happy about the work even though it occasionally pisses people off, and as our user base grows the number of people who are pissed off will increase.

[jaclaz]

But remember (actually remember to your founder/CTO/whatever) that the moment enough people get pissed off, growth will stall, particularly in a niche market, word of mouth is relevant.

Before being allowed to have (too many) pissed off customers you (your app) needs to be unreplaceable (or have much worse or no competitors).

If on the other hand you would expect to have no pissed off customers, you will need to reduce your expectations.