I just have to laugh at this title. It's delusional.
Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology
51–60 of 176 posts
Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology
#52You 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…
Jon Postel perhaps?
Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That sentiment has actually been stated? I honestly thought it was on the uptrend...
Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology
#54You 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…
Aren't software as a service and cloud computing examples of businesses that are primarily about maintenance?
It seems to me that the best businesses are mostly about maintaining and profiting from some technology. Startups are advised to keep costs very low until they have "product-market fit", that is, until they have innovated enough to have made something that people want. After product-market fit has been achieved, marketing and sales begin to dominate; the technical innovation is over except for maintenance and incremental improvement.
Most businesses don't require innovation at all. McDonald's, for example, didn't invent the hamburger, but it has grown large because of its ability to grow while maintaining high standards.
Even businesses that we would think of as very innovative don't make their profits on continual innovation as much as growing and maintaining a standard process. YCombinator, for example, has a process of selecting great companies and nurturing them. The companies do a lot of innovating, but YC itself is basically maintaining and incrementally improving the innovation of Paul Graham and the other original founders.
Profit comes during the maintenance stage.
Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology
#55You 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 j…
The glamor is fake, the dollars are real.
(OK, fine the dollars aren't real either, but what they can buy is.)
Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
So who are all those people going on about the inherent awfulness of government and how it should be replaced by private businesses?
The new nationalist/globalist split emerging/subsuming the fading conservative/liberal split is shattering this trope. I don't see any particularly ideological reason conservatives (high conscientiousness, border and rules oriented) shouldn't be in favor of plenty of government. And good and hard, at that. I have said before we are entering the era of post-modern politics, where values will invert (e.g. free speech)…
What's the demarcation of post-modern politics?
Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology
#57Does Edisons 1% inspiration (innovation) and 99% perspiration (maintenance) apply?
Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meh, if innovators didn't, somebody else would. As the frontier of knowledge expands, increasingly more low-hanging fruit appears on the horizon.
If the maintainers didn't make the world go around, somebody else would. Either way those that would have to fill the spots would likely not be as competent in the doing.
Without maintenance things decline. Progress is exciting, decay banal. A recent example is the Oroville Dam spillway.
Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology
#59Innovation changes the world, maintenance keeps it going.
Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology
#60"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 Not really. The need for maintenance occurs when a specific "Thing" has been around for long enough, and when the institutions, schools of thought that sustain that Thing persist for long enough. When there are radical, rapid political/economic/political changes, "maintenance" and the need for maintenance goes away. This article focusses on maintenance of ind…
There used to be major US companies that were really into maintenance, and pverbuilding for low maintenance. The Bell System. The Pennsylvania Railroad (the Standard Railroad of the World). The King Ranch (the King Ranch line was "we don't fix fence, we build fence.") Teletype Corporation. IBM. Xerox.
There's something to be said for that.