It wasn’t until I worked at a startup that I heard the phrase, “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” If you’re not familiar, “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature,” is a wry and ironic response by a developer to a user who calls out a bug in software. The feature part of the phrase may be true, or it could be a lazy programmer’s parlor trick to avoid dealing with the bug. More broadly expanded, the phrase means what you thought was a problem, is actually a benefit.
That’s why I think the expression can aptly describe what it feels like to be older in tech. While younger employees may think age is a problem, we know it’s a benefit. We know that in fact our decades of experience–at work and at life–actually make us more valuable. The only problem is trying to convince the younger folks of this.
Wired has a fascinating story on the history of “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature,” which is also fondly known as INABIAF. According to the story, the phrase’s evolution began in 19th-century mechanics when the term bug was substituted for defect. At this point, bugs were always bad though, never features. But as bug terminology moved from manufacturing to software, a couple of centuries later programmer culture had created a twist. Sometimes, the problem that users found actually helped them use the software! Or, the programmer could claim that, whether or not it was true. In fact, by 1975, a collection of programmers’ phrases in a lexicon called Jargon Finder included this definition:
A standard joke is that a bug can be turned into a feature simply by documenting it (then theoretically no one can complain about it because it’s in the manual), or even by simply declaring it to be good. The phrase had become mainstream by the late ‘90s.
The internet is filled with examples of INABIAF, both funny and otherwise, many in video game culture. A famous one concerns the game Civilization. A bug allowed the Gandhi character in the game–who was intended to be at the least aggressive level–to, in certain circumstances, become even more aggressive than all others, often engaging in “unmotivated nuclear bombing.” This was considered a major error because the historical Gandhi was the opposite–a pacifist. The bug was not removed for several versions of the game, by which time it had become beloved and a hallmark of the game. I should mention, however, that there has been some speculation that the Gandhi bug-to-feature story is a myth. You can check out other INABIAF stories on Reddit and Quora.
But back to why those of us who’ve been around a while in tech are not bugs but features. I love that the Wired story ends with this: “What is evolution but a process by which glitches in genetic code come to be revealed as prized biological functions? Each of us is an accumulation of bugs that turned out to be features, a walking embodiment of INABIAF.” That’s exactly what our years bring to the table.