I'm a bit torn on Fix-it weeks. They are nice but many bugs simply aren't worth fixing. Generally, if they were worth fixing - they would have been fixed.

I do appreciate though that certain people, often very good detail oriented engineers, find large backlogs incredibly frustrating so I support fix-it weeks even if there isn't clear business ROI.

> Generally, if they were worth fixing - they would have been fixed.

???

Basically any major software product accumulates a few issues over time. There's always a "we can fix that later" mindset and it all piles up. MacOS and Windows are both buggy messes. I think I speak for the vast majority of people when I say that I'd prefer they have a fix-it year and just get rid of all the issues instead of trying to rush new features out the door.

Maybe rushing out features is good for more money now, but someday there'll be a straw that breaks the camel's back and they'll need to devote a lot of time to fix things or their products will be so bad that people will move to other options.

A greedy algorithm (in the academic sense, although I suppose also in the colloquial sense) isn't the optimal solution to every problem. Sometimes doing the next most valuable thing at a given step can still lead you down a path where you're stuck at a local optimum, and the only way to get somewhere better is to do something that might not be the most valuable thing measured at the current moment only; fixing bugs is the exact type of thing that sometimes has a low initial return but can pay dividends down the line.

ROI is in reduced backlog, reduced duplicate reports and most importantly mitigation of risk of phase transition between good enough and crap. This transition is not linear, it’s a step function when the amount of individually small and mildly annoying at worst issues is big enough to make the experience of using the whole product frustrating. I’m sure you can think of very popular examples of such software.