[HN Gopher] Decoding the innovation delusion, nurturing the main...
___________________________________________________________________
Decoding the innovation delusion, nurturing the maintenance mindset
Author : samizdis
Score : 47 points
Date : 2021-02-06 15:57 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| abnry wrote:
| Pushing for innovation is often a part of playing the status
| game. People pay attention to novelty because it is, in fact,
| novel. That is, unusual. Novelty also has the potential to
| benefit one's life in a new way, which is exciting.
|
| Of course, keeping the lights on benefits your life, but you take
| it for granted.
| mlthoughts2018 wrote:
| I disagree very strongly with this even though I strongly support
| ideas like "choose boring technology" and "reliability is your
| number one feature."
|
| The issue is that none of this can be decoupled from politics,
| and "maintenance first" tells you that the force with political
| power is some version of a Dilberty group of rent-seeking IT
| leaders who just want to be paid without having to do much work.
|
| That has pros and cons compared to politics driven by product
| leaders with unrealistic ideas of shipping new features, but at
| least they have hustle, ambition, animation and lifeforce. I find
| the trade offs are worse with anti-ambition "maintenance first"
| IT leaders.
|
| Setting IT maintenance as a core strategy, rather than something
| that _serves_ a strategy, is complete death. Employees better
| hope they like the dead end career they have at such a company,
| because it's going to cut them off from any lifeline to
| relevancy.
|
| The company also better hope they are right in their estimate
| that a big mass of customers will be satisfied with just
| maintenance and reliability. If you are in any kind of
| competitive industry, advanced features or new tech that allows
| price cuts for your competitor are going to cripple you, and you
| will be way too slow and dinosaurish to recover or react.
|
| Finally "maintenance mode" places tend to pay poorly. Not because
| innovation is unfairly paid better, but because they want to
| offer claims (but usually not realities) of work life balance and
| other fringe benefits, while just pay less, giving crappy 5% bog
| standard raises, no bonuses.
|
| When an employee has hustle and ambition and wants to achieve
| correspondingly more and produce correspondingly more output in
| exchange for significant growth in compensation, they'll just be
| given a line that they can't be, in principle, because the
| company's fundamental way of working is incremental maintenance.
| A career goal of ambitious projects is conceptually disallowed,
| along with any goals of related comp growth. So as a result, you
| can bet you'll be working with a bunch of extremely mediocre
| colleagues, a lot of them only taking a 9-5 job that fits other
| obligations like family stuff, and figuring they've given up on
| ambition or wealth building _and you should too._
|
| It reminds me of a famous quote by TS Eliot when he grew sick of
| university life at Oxford (paraphrasing)
|
| > Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead.
| rini17 wrote:
| Hustle, ambition, animation and lifeforce is likely to result
| in burnout, even PTSD. It is also unsustainable in other ways.
| It has its place but not as universal ideal.
| mlthoughts2018 wrote:
| No they don't lead to burnout. Those are just basic
| attributes of working hard and taking healthy engagement.
| More like the advice of, "hire people who give a shit."
|
| Burnout comes from other things added onto a situation.
| Believe me I've seen lots of severe burnout at places that
| are "maintenance only" no-ambition shops. Burnout is much
| more about disenfranchisement and a big gap between
| motivation and requirements. Rarely is burnout a function of
| raw hours worked (and when it is, it's easy to solve).
| spockz wrote:
| > Setting IT maintenance as a core strategy, rather than
| something that serves a strategy, is complete death.
|
| IMHO, this part is spot on. However, it also does not mean that
| we should only go for the new, shiny, things. There is great
| value in maintaining the foundation and keeping it running
| smoothly so that others can go ahead and build the shiny
| things. We should just be careful and deliberate in assigning
| some of the value of that shiny things also to the foundations
| on which the shiny things were build.
| mlthoughts2018 wrote:
| Yeah, agreed. Maintenance, reliability and tech debt should
| be first class concerns. _Product_ strategy should include
| them, allocate time for them and give clear guidance of the
| trade offs that drive prioritization of these lines of work
| vs prototyping, feature delivery, etc.
|
| Neglecting maintenance is a very bad idea, but setting it up
| as an enshrined cultural north star of an engineering
| department is actually even worse.
| blabitty wrote:
| Maintenance should be just that, maintenance - something
| you attend to regularly to prevent future problems. The
| problem our industry has is that every approach to software
| has become a religious like cargo cult activity. In my
| opinion the cause of that is the consultancy-executive
| symbiotic nexus, consultants promise exciting silver
| bullets and executives buy in because they can always blame
| the consultants if it goes wrong.
| ErikAugust wrote:
| People sell "innovation" at a huge premium. You can make wild
| projections because there's not a history of past performance to
| model from. It's like rookie cards. The rookie card of the player
| who doesn't pan out is briefly worth a lot more than the card of
| the durable all-star in their seventh year.
| hawktheslayer wrote:
| The problem I see at my company is one of incentives. However
| much as a manager I want my staff to "maintain" and "care", the
| performance review process rewards people who can "innovate" and
| build new things. For instance we have hundreds of legacy reports
| (e.g. a tabular report for the finance dept built in Crystal)
| that need maintenance and updates, but it's typically easier and
| more rewarding for a developer to leave that work to someone else
| and focus their efforts on getting credit for building a new
| report (a fairly low information visual report build in Tableau
| for Execs at the company).
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-02-06 23:01 UTC)