The hard part isn't finding problems

Source: Hacker News thread, responding to How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer.

Direction candidates

• Choosing among too many problems. The constraint is not discovery but judgment: decide what is most urgent, what matters most, and which fires to leave burning. Making peace with the unsolved work may be part of the job. (9dev, sandeepkd)
• Solving a pattern instead of an instance. A higher-leverage intervention may address several problems, or remove a whole class of bugs, while looking less connected to the immediate fire. (9dev, therealdrag0, Geof25)

Perspectives from the thread

• The backlog may be structurally impossible to clear: one commenter saw three to four times more bugs than the team could fix, with the total still growing after fixes. (ryandrake)
• The real constraint may be autonomy rather than prioritization. Engineers can see critical problems but remain assigned to feature work and redesigns. (ryandrake)
• Waiting is a selection mechanism. Let possible problems accumulate instead of turning each first report into a project; repetition may reveal which ones deserve action. (esafak)
• A large pool of known problems does not eliminate discovery. Unrecognized problems may have more leverage, so listening and "being a sponge" still matter. (tikhonj)
• The thread disagrees on what makes work staff-level. One view favors architectural changes that eliminate a class of bugs; another says impact, not complexity or line count, is the test. (therealdrag0, rckclmbr)
• A proposed filter: the problem should require senior judgment and create real value for the company or its users. (underdeserver)
• Systemic work has a legibility problem. Coworkers may see someone building a tool rather than solving the requested problem, even when the tool addresses several backlog items. (Geof25)
• Long-term improvements can be hard to see and harder to prove. There is no control group showing what would have happened without the intervention. (bluGill)
• Environment changes the shape of the struggle. The original commenter distinguishes startup work from settings where finding worthwhile problems is itself difficult; others say corporate environments also produce idea backlogs far beyond available time. (9dev, markus_zhang, devmor)
• Avoid stopping at "waiting is a superpower." The useful post would need to make the selection mechanism concrete rather than lean on the phrase. (hyperhello)