I once heard that quality of a deliverable is not the sum of its bugs; that is, bugs don’t determine the quality of what you ship. Followers of such thought treated bugs with pure coldness and focused on whether their product is usable or not. If they can do x, y, and z; then, we can keep going irrespective how bugs are piling up. And they are still in business.
If you are working as QA Engineer in one of those places, I urge you to change employer immediately; for the reason I am going to share with you now.
Bug management is one of the key aspects that build your personality as a QA professional. It creates in you that critical thinking about software behavior, it connects you with customers, it deepens your understanding about every single aspect about your domain, technically and product-wise. While I definitely agree that the quality of software is not just about bugs, but indeed it is bugs + other things; not other things only.
If you are QA professional, irrespective of your career level, spend time with bugs: understand them, see patterns, categorize them, create statistics, create meanings out of them, and use them as drivers to next actions and decisions… And enjoy that process for maximum effect.
