Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

projectm-online.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 176 posts

Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

#41

Post by [deleted] »

carsongross wrote: post #38
maxxxxx wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be true for the original meaning of the words but I don't see how today's conservatives are maintainers and today's liberals are innovators. It's probably closer to the opposite.

I am using Peterson's psychological definition of liberal and conservative temperaments, which I think holds regardless of the current manifestations of (and abuses of) the terms. He has theorized that the core political, and in fact philosophical and perhaps even more deeply, religious, battle in the west is between people who think there should be borders (physical, e.g. between nations, conceptual, e.g. between se…

[deleted]

Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

#42

Post by cies »

upofadown wrote: post #36

Obviously the thesis is true. Maintenance is crucial while innovation rarely changes anything substantive... I think that is the reason that we hold innovators in high regard. People are very bad at it and it happens so infrequently. We rarely get the right person when we hand out credit so such idolization is usually meaningless, but I suppose in the long run that is not important. We have this irrational need to at…

"We" hold innovators in high regard because of technology and the way capitalism neeeeeds technology. We live under capitalism so we are taught to love innovation. By maintenance alone a capitalist (person who has so much he no longer needs to work) cannot out run the herd, he needs to innovate because the other capitalists are also innovating. Since labour has already been squeezed to the max, they seek technologies that increase the output of labour, or even "better", make labour obsolete.

Workers should be weary of innovation, but they have been taught to love it, and thus they do :)

Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

#45

Post by euske »

milquetoastaf wrote: post #23
Animats wrote: post #2

"If the President had picked me to predict which country [in postwar Europe] would recover first, I would say, 'Bring me the records of maintenance.' The nation with the best maintenance will recover first. Maintenance is something very, very specifically Western. They haven't got it in Russia. If I got in there in the warehouse, let's say, and I saw that the broom had a special nail, I would say, 'This is the nail o…

>Maintenance is something very, very specifically Western. Yep, no other cultures maintain anything.

This is pretty laughable. To me, almost every Western country is half-broken. When I lived in the US, I was surprised how frequent power faults were there. Streets are full of bumps and corroded pipes were everywhere. And in Europe. Do they have any concept of a decent public bathroom over there? Oh, and don't get me started on how badly their trains are operating. I bet that many train accidents are due to the poor maintenance. It's probably true that maintenance is less paid an attention in poor countries, and there are more non-Western countries that are poor. But it's funny that people can get away with a claim like this. It almost sounds like a white supremacist to me.

TL;DR: Japan is nice.

Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

#46

Post by majormajor »

draw_down wrote: post #4

You might say I've observed this many times in my career. I think the best move career-wise is to be one of the people who makes the new thing. Those who clean up after them, bear the brunt of their design flaws and careless mistakes, will never be recognized, appreciated, or remunerated as well. At least in my experience. Ask yourself this: who is the most famous maintainer you can think of? (Not someone who devised…

>Those who clean up after them, bear the brunt of their design flaws and careless mistakes, will never be recognized, appreciated, or remunerated as well.

It's a tradeoff. Innovating employee #10 at a big succesful startup will be better-rewarded than your average maintaining employee at, say, Facebook today, but that "maintainer" is going to be far better rewarded than innovating employee #5 at some-startup-whose-new-thing-proves-unwanted.

Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

#47

Post by mee_too »

AcerbicZero wrote: post #37
Animats wrote: post #2

"If the President had picked me to predict which country [in postwar Europe] would recover first, I would say, 'Bring me the records of maintenance.' The nation with the best maintenance will recover first. Maintenance is something very, very specifically Western. They haven't got it in Russia. If I got in there in the warehouse, let's say, and I saw that the broom had a special nail, I would say, 'This is the nail o…

Hoffer is wrong. He's confusing different military philosophies with this mixed up idea about national identity regarding "maintenance". I don't think anyone would suggest Germany didn't perform a minor miracle by rebuilding as quickly as they did (with massive support), but the Russians went from having half their country burned to the ground, to a world superpower (also with a large amount of support), in a shorter…

Who supported Russia after the war?

Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

#48

Post by eropple »

sebelk wrote: post #43

And what about devops? With OpenStack and et al, aren't gurus telling us that maintainance (adminitración) doesn't exist no more?

How exactly does that follow?

I'm a "devops engineer", and fully half of the concern around what I do is "how do we make this maintainable and know when maintenance is necessary?".

Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

#49

Post by toomuchtodo »

eropple wrote: post #48
sebelk wrote: post #43

And what about devops? With OpenStack and et al, aren't gurus telling us that maintainance (adminitración) doesn't exist no more?

How exactly does that follow? I'm a "devops engineer", and fully half of the concern around what I do is "how do we make this maintainable and know when maintenance is necessary?".

The death of devops/sysadmins/infrastructure engineers has been greatly exaggerated within the startup scene.

Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

#50

Post by whack »

You could say the same thing about any non-glamorous/lucrative position.

"Garbagemen make the world go round. Without them, we would drown in our own filth"

"Nannies make the world go round. Without them, half the workforce would be stuck at home"

"Auto mechanics make the world go round. Without them, we would have no way of getting places"

Ultimately, all such arguments are inane and pointless because every single job that exists in society

A) is important to the people paying for it

B) has wages that are based on both the importance of the job and how easy it is to find someone capable of doing it

C) The idea of glamorizing any job, and allowing yourself to be influenced by a job's glamor-rating, is just superficial drivel. Don't judge yourself or others by the job listed on their business card. If you feel the need to judge someone at all, judge them by the impact that they, as an individual, are making in the world.

Post reply on HN