[monsieurbanana]

To people reading this: please never ever do that, unless it was agreed upon with your client/employer beforehand (and compensated accordingly).

If you know the code may break in 5 years, why don't you fix it now? Because your employer doesn't want to pay you to do that (probably for good reason, surely there's higher priorities).

Then why would you do it for free years later?

[sosodev]

I'm fairly certain most managers would argue that I'm wasting my time if I spend it chasing bugs that won't happen for several years.

[not2b]

Sometimes it's because they don't know it will break in 5 years. They weren't anticipating exponential growth and when they started, the i32 range was a thousand times more than they needed. Ten more doublings later ...

[kristopolous]

No.

You can say, anticipate breaking changes that is calendared to happen as an eventually rollover or deprecation

Essentially things have to work one way now and there's solid reason to think it will no longer work that way later and there's no valid path to fix because exogenous conditions change.

This alternatively, can be done in bad faith to guarantee a future paycheck by intentionally placing timebombs in and then charging high rates to come back. There's incentives for abuse.

I'm making it clear and acting in good faith. I can give them 2 hours for free in 5 years, whatever. I'm a competent and responsible person and I get paid well by not being so cheap.

[monsieurbanana]

We're not talking about working in bad faith, that's bad obviously. But there's no reason for most people to give away even 2 hours of their time for free. If you're working as a freelancer and it's your way of building a portfolio of clients, that's a good reason to give away those two hours. But I'd rather not have someone with little work experience read that, think it's reasonable, and apply it themselves.

In my first year of university I was working for a very small web company. I got paid per website an amount that was enough for my student needs, nothing much. I wasn't a very good developer in my 1st year, so I often received emails about bugs in past projects. The bugs were my fault, so naturally I fixed them in my own free time.

It took me 2 years to see how badly I was getting owned by the company. If they wanted less bugs, they should have asked someone with experience and a much higher salary.

[josho]

The employer also shouldn't take you up on the offer because now you are engaging in work without a contract, which opens up contract issues, probably breaks things like SOC compliance, etc.

I like your accountability, but it's sufficient to document the issue in code, open a jira (or equivalent) and move on.