
Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology - ForHackernews
https://projectm-online.com/investing/why-maintenance-means-more-to-peoples-lives-than-innovation/
======
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.

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

For my entry to Improbable Ideas day.... why don't we bring children to work?
After they're no longer infants, its' plausible for children to simply run
around the office, sitting quietly in the same rooms as their parents, and
perhaps doing odd-jobs.

It'd require a more holistic attitude to education than is presently allowed,
but it is certainly possible to implement.

~~~
prawn
If I'm working from home, even if my 4yo has every toy in the house at his
disposal, after a while he will inevitably come into the home office and spin
around on the spare chair saying "Why do you have to wooooork so much? I need
you to help me buuuuuiiiild something. Why can't you help me? I can't find (a
particular piece of Lego). Why is Mama at wooooork? Why are you working?"

~~~
mjevans
The child is asking a valuable question.

Why all of this working? How can the work be explained, made interesting and
relevant. Is there some way of involving the child that is educational rather
than abusive? (Also, if a 5 year old can understand how to correctly use the
UI for the application, why can't your client?)

~~~
wyattpeak
I think it'd be a valuable question if it were asked by someone sincerely
interested in the answer, but at that age children are really just
complaining.

Could you involve the child? Maybe, but training someone for work is non-
trivial. When I'm just starting to train someone, our collective output is
usually less than mine working alone, and that's for someone with the
requisite skills. How much work could reasonably be assigned to children in a
way which isn't just a waste of time? How much are they really going to
benefit from that?

~~~
abalashov
I agree as regards four year-olds. That said, the usefulness of older
children, even ~8-10, is frequently underestimated. There was a time when they
made useful apprentices and assistants, though admittedly at crafts that were
probably less abstract and specialised.

Still, I started programming and using UNIX when I was 9. I imagine I was
probably capable of some amount of useful output by 11-12, though it would
have to be carefully directed by a pragmatic mentor with a view to bottom-line
impact.

~~~
animal531
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted, perhaps because people don't want
to imagine modern child labour.

From my side, in the company where I work there are a small handful of people
who could easily be replaced with fully unskilled labour (ie. an 8-12yo) with
no negative effects.

~~~
Asooka
Except for negative effects on the children? How do you schedule that with
school and homework?

~~~
animal531
Of course. I was only showing it as a comparison from the adult side to show
that some adults are easily replaceable with children.

I wouldn't want to actually implement it.

------
wjke2i9
> I’ve actually felt slightly uncomfortable at TED for the last two days,
> because there’s a lot of vision going on, right? And I am not a visionary. I
> do not have a five-year plan. I’m an engineer. And I think it’s really – I
> mean – I’m perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and
> just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying, “I want to
> go there.” But I’m looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole
> that’s right in front of me before I fall in. This is the kind of person I
> am. - Linus Torvalds @TED[1]

[1]
[https://www.ted.com/talks/linus_torvalds_the_mind_behind_lin...](https://www.ted.com/talks/linus_torvalds_the_mind_behind_linux/transcript?language=en#t-1001151)

~~~
Qwertious
Also:

>"WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!"

In response to the notion that we need to break userspace in the name of
progress/innovation.

------
Animats
_" 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 of immortality.'"_ \- Eric Hoffer

~~~
jalayir
> 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 industrial
artifacts, and nowhere in recent times have industrial artifacts (boats,
lifts, software), the companies that produce them, and the living standards
they create, and the governments that encourage them been continuously
existent longer than the "Western countries" (since the early 1800s at least).
If you were to look outside the sphere of industrial artifacts, for example at
old religious buildings - churches, mosques, temples - you'll see solid
examples of good maintenance all over the world. The Koran, a literary
artifact, for example, has been well-maintained for over a thousand years
across the world by a mostly pre-industrial society.

TLDR: Keeping something running isn't just a "Western" thing - but keeping
industrial products running is certainly Western, because only the West has
seen a continuous and sustained industrial movement for over 200+ years.

~~~
Animats
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.

------
draw_down
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 an innovation and then maintained it - pure maintenance)

~~~
bussierem
I'd be very curious to know why this is getting downvoted, and if it has
anything to do with the fact that YCombinator is a hub for the 'innovators'
the post (and this comment) are talking about.

Don't downvote because someone hurts your feelings - that's not what this site
is for, guys.

~~~
draw_down
Aw, it's just fake internet points. I don't worry about it too much

~~~
WaxProlix
It's also an issue of visibility. Downvoted comments are seen less and don't
get to contribute to the zeitgeist. That's sort of by design and I'm not
trying to have that conversation, just saying that it's more than "aw, just
internet points".

------
maehwasu
This is like saying LeBron James is less important than Cleveland's role
players, because you need five people on a side to have a basketball team.

The question isn't who's "necessary", since everyone who is necessary, no
matter in what way, is necessary; necessity is a tautology.

The question is whose contributions are more replaceable.

~~~
rcjones
Had to reply here given how special it is to watch LeBron play right now. Even
if you're not a basketball fan, watching LeBron is like watching an extra
rogue queen run a chess board. He should be past the peak of his career, but
he's adapted his game to become a better all-around player. Reminds me of Mega
Man suits where he can co-opt certain abilities given who's on the floor. He
can kind of make his teammates necessary, if that makes sense. And he's more
than aware of everything that's happening on the floor and on the benches. Him
pulling Powell back on the court was a fun, albeit silly example of this:
[https://twitter.com/wenotsocks/status/860900323275264002](https://twitter.com/wenotsocks/status/860900323275264002)

I'm not sure there's much relevance here, but there's something to watching
someone maintain competitiveness as they age.

------
shriphani
There is probably a distribution here that matters - without maintenance there
is no foundation for innovation, without innovation there is no motivation to
maintain - man wants to produce and consume newer ideas, materials, tools,
items etc.

There's a great piece in the Lapham's quarterly about maintaining NYC's
infrastructure and how without any maintenance, NYC would be replaced by
forest cover within 200 years. Can't find it right now but it is a great read
trust me.

------
rusk
This reminds me of a great quote, attributed to Thomas Eddison:

 _" Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work"_

[https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/thomasaed104931....](https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/thomasaed104931.html)

------
spc476
You know, if Hollywood made the blockbuster movie "Infrastructure" [1],
maintenance might be views as a "good thing."

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpzvaqypav8&t=17m14s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpzvaqypav8&t=17m14s)

------
theprop
No, it's precisely the opposite! Maintainers (using whale oil for energy)
would have driven every whale to extinction and left the world without an
energy source a century ago. Maintainers (using horses for travel) would have
drowned Manhattan in horse shit a century ago.

Innovation is if anything under-rated and under-funded and under-supported.
The homes of hundreds of millions of people and energy itself is threatened by
depleting fossil fuels and global warming...and some of the major efforts to
stop this have depended on effectively "insane" entrepreneurs like Elon
Musk...not a smart system! All the while hundreds of billions of dollars in
health care costs for just say unnecessary tests flows to negative value
addition maintainers.

Maintainers mostly either conservatively follow & accept or exploit the
current system. It's innovators who've driven down the cost of lighting your
home to a few hours of income or the ubiquity & cheapness of books &
information (perhaps to the detriment of wisdom but that's another story) to
stopping war through protest to ending non-man-made famine.

~~~
maxerickson
Wouldn't maintainers just be in small social groups, eating fruit and whatever
else they happened to collect?

~~~
theprop
That's hunter-gatherers! That's more than 10,000 years ago before agriculture
developed...

~~~
maxerickson
Sure. How do you get from there to a city without any innovation?

How do you even get to _a sharp stick_ without innovation?

~~~
rusk
_> How do you get from there to a city_

Enclosure
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure)

Basically peasants, once kicked off the land end up herded into cities.

Presumably the thinking at the time (beyond _" lets make ourselves rich"_) was
that agricultural production is more efficient when undertaken as a large-
scale concern rather than by scattered small community holdings.

~~~
maxerickson
So how is the step of consolidating the land not an innovation then?

Or the invention of the various tools to actually make the agriculture viable
and progressively more efficient.

~~~
rusk
It is an innovation. I was presenting this as an alternative antecedent to the
development of cities.

Also provides an interesting corollary on the consequences of innovation.

------
mentat
On a lighter note, Pump 6 from "Pump 6 and Other Stories"
([https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0071CX7V4/](https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0071CX7V4/))
is a fun take on a world that has become too good at making things that don't
need maintenance.

~~~
cpeterso
In contrast, in David Brin's _The Practice Effect_ objects improve with use
instead of wearing out. Rich people hire others to "practice" their
possessions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_Effect)

------
kbutler
Innovation changes the world, maintenance keeps it going.

------
upofadown
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
attach a person to the idea.

So we end up failing to properly credit _any_ of the people that make and keep
our civilization...

~~~
throwaway91111
> People are very bad at it and it happens so infrequently.

Is this really true? Plenty of innovations occur in parallel. Perhaps the
people who desire to innovate dwarf the opportunities for innovation.

------
shade23
Wouldnt maintenance lead to innovation analogous to necessity being the mother
of invention?

Most of the inventions came up as an easier or better way of doing something
which was the current maintainer(to be innovator?) decided to rework/create .

And if the author talks about only maintenance where no development can be
done(even those that make the life of maintainer easier). IMHO , Maintenance
procedures should also be constantly improved and hence that would lead to
innovation.

------
frabbit
I found the thesis interesting and plausible: that innovation is fetishized.

But on a slight tangent I wondered whether the "innovation" that they complain
about is a particular variant, one that we're all familiar with here: a
pseudo-libertarian start-up variant

    
    
      "Innovation ideology is overvalued, often insubstantial, and preoccupied with well-to-do white guys … in a small region of California"
    

It seems easy to argue against this tired representative of innovation.

By contrast there are those that would argue that most of the major
technological and scientific gains have arisen, not from these VC hype-
machines, but from large-scale state planning and investment. One of the best
expositions of this argument is from economist Mariana Mazzucato:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPvG_fGPvQo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPvG_fGPvQo)

------
cgio
Or as I like to say, "incompetence makes the world go round". Extracting
little glimpses of functionality out of a chaotic mess is a challenging, at
times satisfying and definitely valuable exercise that keeps many people at
work...

Maintenance is not the opposite of innovation, it is the opposite of good
design.

~~~
blowski
I'm not sure I understand your point - the best built system in the world
still needs maintenance. Parts go rusty. Requirements change. Those are not
results of bad design, but the inevitable consequences of the real world.

~~~
cgio
The better the design the less the maintenance. There might not be a perfect
design in the real world, and we would agree on that. But at least the ideal
perfect design would imply zero maintenance.

~~~
blowski
What happens if requirements change? What happens if a related technology is
invented which would make your current design more efficient? Do you class
changes like that under maintenance?

And how do you check your theoretically 'no-maintenance-required' design
genuinely doesn't need any maintenance? And how do you get round the catch 22
that you can't build a perfect system without perfect knowledge about what to
build, but you can't have perfect knowledge without feedback from an existing
system?

Instead of building a product that theoretically never needs maintenance, I'd
rather build a product for which maintenance is easy.

~~~
tormeh
Well, maintenance is what you do to avoid (negative) change. Changing
requirements or improvements are not maintenance.

------
danielam
There's an analogy here vis-a-vis tradition/progress. In order to be
reasonably sure that a change is an improvement, you must understand what
you're changing and how. To borrow a Chestertonian example, if you encounter a
fence and you don't know why it's there, find out why before you remove it.
Maintainers are in the best position to understand the impact of making
changes, and because of that, they're able to function as either advisers or
as "innovators" by knowing where improvements can be made and having the
knowledge to understand why they're improvements.

------
madenine
The maintainers! I know a couple people connected to this group - heard great
things about their 2nd conference last month.

The premise is great. From Russel's article on Aeon:

"We organised a conference to bring the work of the maintainers into clearer
focus. More than 40 scholars answered a call for papers asking, ‘What is at
stake if we move scholarship away from innovation and toward maintenance?’
Historians, social scientists, economists, business scholars, artists, and
activists responded. They all want to talk about technology outside of
innovation’s shadow."

------
rdiddly
What about Improvers? Not a word about us? You can innovate while maintaining.

------
acchow
Ridiculous. Maintenance is momentum. Innovation is boost.

Each boost is miniscule, but our momentum is enormous after thousands of years
of human development so of course maintaining our momentum gets us incredibly
far.

------
pc2g4d
I'd say there's no fine line between maintenance and innovation. Many
innovations arise in response to the pains of maintenance.

------
carsongross
Related video by Jordan Peterson, on how liberals and conservatives need one
another because liberals (high trait openness) innovate, but conservatives
(high trait conscientiousness) maintain things:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ho5VZp_ps4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ho5VZp_ps4)

~~~
pjc50
So who are all those people going on about the inherent awfulness of
government and how it should be replaced by private businesses?

~~~
carsongross
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) and maintaining coherent narratives will
be increasingly difficult. Unfortunately, I think this means people will cling
to whatever stable identity they can ever more tenaciously.

~~~
maxerickson
What's the demarcation of post-modern politics?

~~~
carsongross
Post-modern politics can be contrasted with modern-era universalist
rationalism: identity politics become dominant, inter-temporal logical
consistency becomes less important, inter-group dialog becomes devalued, power
structures become interesting for their own sake, etc.

A stepwise abandonment of enlightenment ideals for raw inter-group Foucauldian
power plays.

------
golergka
OT, but this site looks just great with Javascript turned off (as I usually do
with all the "trendy"-looking longreads, as they tend to be processor hogs).
Even animations on the title screen. Awesome front-end job.

------
deskamess
Does Edisons 1% inspiration (innovation) and 99% perspiration (maintenance)
apply?

------
lowbloodsugar
If maintaining these things is important, might we have to wonder how they
came to be?

------
sammyo
Maintainers make the world go round, innovators MAKE the world.

~~~
amelius
Meh, if innovators didn't, somebody else would.

As the frontier of knowledge expands, increasingly more low-hanging fruit
appears on the horizon.

~~~
owebmaster
> Meh, if innovators didn't, somebody else would

And then this somebody would be an innovator.

~~~
throwaway91111
Making the label near meaningless.

Innovation is inevitable; so too are people claiming credit for it.

Honestly, we need a better label for "anti-innovator" (conservative is
taken)—they have an oversized personal impact on the world.

------
mlindner
I just have to laugh at this title. It's delusional.

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

~~~
eropple
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?".

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

~~~
eropple
Agreed, though I think it somewhat depends on your definition. Most sysadmins
at my clients have been uneasy at the pervasive sort of automation that we
like; a lot of it is much more dev-heavy than a "modern" sysadmin (not your
graybearded Perl wizard) seems comfortable with. Everybody else? Business is
pretty great.

