Ask HN: Can one be self-employed fixing bugs?
A few things that make full-time bug fixing unlikely in a freelance capacity:<p>First, you need a significant amount of access and context on any codebase to be productive. Unless you're promising them a long-term commitment (and at that point are you really freelancing?) they might be hesitant to invest in fully training you, getting you credentials, etc. It's more likely that you'll get a niche project that you can work on independently, somewhat detached from the main project.<p>Second, even if you do build up enough context to work on big bugs, their causes are rarely shallow. What if you find a need for a major refactor or technology migration? As a freelancer, you have limited stakes in the process. So pushing your solution will involve playing all the normal politics, but as an outsider without any leverage. Hope you're convincing and enjoy lots of meetings.<p>Third, sadly, bugs just are not prioritized in today's product-led software environment. Existing employees are likely staring at their own backlog of bugs that they would love to fix, but which have been de-prioritized to push out new feature work. If (big if) a bug becomes a priority, full-time people with the most context on the problem are going to be doing the actual work - probably in a hurry. So freelancers are more likely to pick up the slack on low-priority feature work while the core devs are putting out fires.