Everything New Has Bugs

Speed and stability are in constant tension. When a DBA told me eBay stayed on an older Oracle version because every new release brought fresh bugs, I learned that teams trade stability for learning whenever they accelerate. The trade-off shows up as a spike in incidents the first time a team moves from quarterly releases to continuous deployment.\n\nAmazon's early-2000s shift from a C++ monolith to a service-oriented architecture turned controlled chaos into uncontrolled chaos, and Facebook's "Move fast and break things" motto eventually gave way to "Move fast with stable infrastructure" after the cost of outages grew too high. Knight Capital's 2012 high-frequency trading mishap illustrates how a process gap, not a coding error, can amplify speed-induced risk.\n\nSpotify's 2016 aggressive rollout of feature toggles caused an initial surge in bugs, but the organization had built error budgets, post-mortems, and test automation to absorb the turbulence. Toyota's and Etsy's practices of giving engineers time to fix problems-what they call slack-show that deliberate inefficiency protects long-term quality and prevents burnout.\n\nThe practical takeaway for leaders is to expect a dip in quality whenever velocity increases, then invest in slack, ownership, and feedback loops so the dip is short and shallow. When engineers feel responsible for production health and have space to improve tooling and processes, the team can sustain higher speed without sacrificing excellence.