
Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance - nothinggoesaway
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/22/opinion/sunday/lets-get-excited-about-maintenance.html
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nathanvanfleet
I mean, I think the best way to start with this is to use a word other than
"maintenance." That's not really the most sexy word if you really want people
to get behind it. Furthermore it just suggests that the work is keeping
something as good as it was from the beginning. Filling in holes, giving it a
coat of paint every now and then.

What it really should be called is "refinement." The innovation ends up being
incredibly crude but it gets the job done. How can we build on that, make it
better and less coarse than it was? How can we make it more efficient?

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nightski
The fact that you need a sexy word is indicative of the problem.

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saltyworker
The fact that you need a sexy word is indicative of _human nature_

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s_kilk
If it were something utterly intrinsic to Human Nature, there would be no
opposition to it.

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firethief
By that definition there is no true human nature.

~~~
s_kilk
Bingo

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liveoneggs
(tangentially related to this article)

I have recently come to realize that, at least in my world, source code older
than five years is basically doomed. Developers simply refuse to work on it.

The code that makes it to five years is extraordinary as most of it "dies"
before reaching the eighteen month mark.

As a result I have recently been shifting my view to support replace-ability
vs maintainability whenever possible. I'm not totally sure how to achieve it,
though. Most current trends seem to be towards increasing baggage. (docker)

Data lives on and on and on, however. Data is king. :)

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marcinzm
>Most current trends seem to be towards increasing baggage. (docker)

I'd disagree, docker for example makes it easier to create infrastructure as
code which in turn makes it easier to replace pieces of that infrastructure.
Same with micro-services which allow you to eventually replace isolated pieces
of your infrastructure. The more modular and isolated pieces of code and
infrastructure are the easier they are to replace piecemeal.

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toomuchtodo
Disagree. Simplicity in unnecessary abstractions is still convuluted.

Although, I concede Docker is the bees knees for local dev.

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TYPE_FASTER
This article posits that you can either maintain, or innovate. This is not at
all true. We can, and should, innovate while maintaining to improve our
maintenance.

We can use automation to gather data we've never had before. We can use this
data to help prioritize maintenance tasks, and get them done faster with less
interruption to service.

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omegaworks
The problem seems to be that we've invested far too much federal money into
projects that have to be maintained by local sources of funding. Big federal
grants for development that will not produce enough tax revenue to offset the
externalities and infrastructure costs that are required to maintain that
development are just albatrosses around states and cities' necks.

[https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-
neighborh...](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-
neighborhoods-make-the-best-investment)

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the_gastropod
Strong Towns is great! There's another concept I was introduced to via Strong
Towns that I think is important: infrastructure is not an asset. It is a
liability. Yet, most cities account for them like they would an asset.

[https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/8/19/is-a-street-
an...](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/8/19/is-a-street-an-
asset.html)

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peterwwillis
In Philadelphia, I passed under the Columbia Bridge by foot, and nearly fell
over when I looked up. An entire section of the bridge has spalled and a huge
gap of reinforcing steel rods is rusted and exposed. This bridge will
collapse. I found no evidence that there is any plan to reinforce or replace
it. Luckily it "only" carries CSX freight. Anyone passing under it should be
extremely wary.

[https://goo.gl/maps/uFkLJoKU1DB2](https://goo.gl/maps/uFkLJoKU1DB2)
[https://goo.gl/maps/767CYu5Mwd62](https://goo.gl/maps/767CYu5Mwd62) (it
actually looks worse than this up close)

I'd be interested to find out what the track record is of maintenance of
infrastructure by private vs public entities.

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maxxxxx
I always think this is the big strength and weakness of the US at the same
time. This country is more willing than other countries to abandon old things
and move on to the next thing. But right now it seems to be falling into the
trap of a lot of pseudo innovation while the foundation is crumbling. Not sure
what the best way is to move forward.

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inopinatus
Gerrymandering severely curtails political incentives for infrastructure
investment. Not saying it's the only issue, but it's a clear case of
undermining the best outcomes from representational democracy.

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marcoperaza
Sometimes you need to stop maintaining things. Towns rise and fall because the
economy changes. If there's no economic activity bringing money into a town,
it should eventually disappear. You need the political courage to stop wasting
money on propping it up. Some bridges, pipes, roads, and trains shouldn't be
repaired or replaced. They need to be closed if dangerous, and allowed to
disappear into history. If holdouts want to keep living in their dead town,
good for them, but don't make the rest of us pay for it.

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vacri
So you're saying that NYC's infrastructure (the city in the article's opening
paragraph) is crumbling because there's no economic activity bringing money
into the city?

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marcoperaza
No, I'm speaking in general.

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harpiaharpyja
While maintenance is certainly undervalued, I don't think that means
innovation is overrated.

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maxxxxx
I think there is a lot of fake innovation happening these days. I bet if the
programmers of the 70s had had the same amount of computing resources
available as we have now they would have built great systems even with the
tools available then. Other than the cloud and more computing and network
power I don't think software development has really moved forward much.

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FanaHOVA
> Other than the cloud and more computing and network power I don't think
> software development has really moved forward much.

So a person from the 70s who was instantly transported to today would feel
like the only difference is that instead of having our own servers we ship
things to Heroku? Please...

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wbl
Have you seen the Alto demos? Quake would be new to them, maybe the browser.
As for shipping to Heroku IBM was renting mainframe timeshares in the 1960's.

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oautholaf
Stewart Brand, "The romance of maintenance is there is no romance of
maintenance". This was basically his point in "How Buildings Learn" (and
really the Long Now too)

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geff82
We stepped out of the plane in New York and soon my Iranian wife called her
mother. "Mom, the roads are about as bad as in Tehran!". Recently, we were in
Tehran again: they had invested heavily in the maintenance of their
infrastructure, making the roads better than in many American cities.

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acomjean
Its hard too. my current job with a large existing code base
(perl/python/shell scripts and java), and keeping it up to date is a large
portion of my time.

The thing is I get very little credit for fixing something that is broken, but
creating something new generates accolades and the illusion of productivity...

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vacri
That's the problem of being a maintainer. You point at something and say
"that's still working", and no-one knows if it's because nothing has happened
anyway, or because you ended up fixing some fatal error in it.

New features are also pretty easy to measure in terms of throw money in, get
features out. Maintenance... how hard do you go? How much is too much? Do you
just need a light check-in? Do you need full reviews? Or is that just wasting
money for no reason?

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jtraffic
I agree with others on the thread that "maintenance or innovation" is a false
dichotomy. In particular, I think we need innovative maintenance. For e.g.,
this article about new ways to fix potholes:
[https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-
technology/217003...](https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-
technology/21700370-researchers-are-inventing-new-ways-prevent-motoring-curse-
hole-story)

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HillaryBriss
interesting article and comments. one commenter points out that roads break
down because of overloading (heavy trucks). another points out that, in colder
countries, ice is a major problem for roads.

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SN76477
Freakonomics did a great story on maintenance last October.
[http://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-praise-of-
maintenance/](http://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-praise-of-maintenance/)

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HillaryBriss
> _The American Society of Civil Engineers considers 17 percent of American
> dams to be “high hazard potential,” including the one outside Oroville,
> Calif., that nearly collapsed in February._

Is this exaggeration? Would any reasonable person say that the Oroville dam
nearly collapsed?

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michaelt

      Would any reasonable person say that the Oroville
      dam nearly collapsed?
    

According to Wikipedia [1], _" Erosion at the base of the weir—which was
expected—progressed much faster than anticipated. The headward erosion of the
emergency spillway threatened to undermine and collapse the concrete weir
[...] Fearing a collapse, the Butte County Sheriff's Office issued an
evacuation order of the Oroville area. [...] Engineers worried that [...]
damage to the main spillway could grow uphill to the point that it endangered
the main spillway gates, leaving no safe way to release water. [...] By
February 13, 188,000 people in the vicinity were reported evacuated. About
23,000 National Guardsmen were ordered to be ready for 'immediate deployment
if the dam spillway should fail' to help with evacuation and relief efforts."_

That sounds a lot like a near-collapse to me.

Of course, you could argue the authorities acted with a surfeit of caution -
perhaps there was only ever a one-in-a-thousand chance of the dam collapsing,
and the threshold for 'nearly collapsed' should be a one-in-five chance of
collapsing. However, I think most reasonable people would say that a one-in-a-
thousand chance of killing 188,000 people living below the dam is several
orders of magnitude too high.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oroville_Dam_cris...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oroville_Dam_crisis&oldid=790686067#Emergency_spillway_damage)

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potbelly83
I think a large part of this is how we hire people. It looks much more sexy on
your resume (and prepares you better for interview type questions) if you have
experience building from scratch a fancy machine learning pipeline, than
maintaining a 100K+ legacy (say > 15 years old) C++ code base.

Not only this, but I've lost count of the number of young guys I see come into
my company (especially the machine learning guys), spend a year exploring some
new technology, then jump ship to a different company when it comes time to
integrate it with the existing legacy code base.

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jshelly
I'm a big fan of this topic. Something we seem to forget is that sometimes new
is not necessarily better.

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booleandilemma
HN had another article about this recently:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14293775](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14293775)

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kutkloon7
"Americans have an impoverished and immature conception of technology, one
that fetishizes innovation as a kind of art and demeans upkeep as mere
drudgery."

Pretty much hits the nail on the head, although I want to note this does not
exclusively apply to Americans (but maybe a bit more than Europeans;
technology is often a lot cheaper in the US: it is not uncommon that the
amount of dollars paid for an item is lower than the amount of euros, even
though euros are worth quite a bit more).

It is especially bad for phones. Many people I who are (almost annoyingly)
aware of the environment buy a new phone every year.

I am guilty myself too. My current phone is about two years old. It has a full
HD screen, a luxury that I don't even need on my laptop (about half of the
time, I work on a 1440x900 thinkpad). And, to be honest, it is getting quite
sluggish. When I open dropbox or tinder, I experience a delay up to 10
seconds, which is quite ridiculous (it especially bothers me that software
seems to get slower, more bloated, and more abstract and complicated).
People's first reaction to hearing this is "Just buy a new phone, man". I
shouldn't be, but I am indeed considering this.

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legolassexyman
How many times are they going to write this article?

