
In Praise of Maintenance (2016) - drewvolpe
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-praise-of-maintenance-rebroadcast/
======
pasbesoin
Maintenance can also help you in creating new things. You see a good basis,
from which to extend with new ideas. You see the beauty and craftsmanship of a
well-designed device, system, etc. And that inspires you, and sets a floor for
the quality of what you want to accomplish.

Maintenance gives you time to "meditate" \-- performing needed and useful work
while keeping a few neurons open for new thought.

And maintenance saves money, allowing you to invest resources in new projects
instead of constantly ad-hoc patching and replacing those you've neglected to
the point of failure.

It can also provide some redundancy. If model 2015 breaks down, maybe model
1985 can carry you through the repairs.

Finally, some of the old tools I have are better than the new. Better to
maintain them, because I can't replace them with their equal or better for any
reasonable price.

It's important to know when to let something go. But, it shouldn't be out of
neglect followed by panicked necessity. Panic can generate inspiration, but
it's not good as a lifestyle.

~~~
ta1234567890
You are so right! It's interesting how this applies to many different fields,
including software development. I've seen quite a few projects/products fail
because maintenance was abandoned in favor of starting from scratch.

Here's a relevant related article by Joel Spolsky:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20170304072731/https://www.joelo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170304072731/https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-
you-should-never-do-part-i/)

~~~
krallja
Why use the Wayback Machine? Joel’s blog is still up:
[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-
should-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-
do-part-i/)

------
Animats
Important subject, terrible article. A famous one, by Eric Hoffer, 1958:

As I walked several blocks from the bus stop to the docks, I was impressed by
the gardens in front of the houses. The houses, of average size, are fairly
old, yet in excellent shape. The people living there are mostly workingmen.

The sight of the gardens and houses turned my mind to the question of
maintenance. It is the capacity for maintenance which is the best test for the
vigor and stamina of a society.

Any society can be galvanized for a while to build something, but the will and
the skill to keep things in good repair day in, day out are fairly rare.

At present, neither in the Communist countries nor in the newly created
nations is there a pronounced capacity for maintenance.

I wonder how true it is that after the Second World War the countries with the
best maintenance were the first to recover. I am thinking of Holland, Belgium
and Western Germany. I don’t know how it is in Japan.

The Incas had an intense awareness of maintenance. They assigned whole
villages and tribes to keep roads, bridges and buildings in good repair.

I read somewhere that in ancient Rome a man was disqualified as a candidate
for office because his garden showed neglect.

~~~
amelius
> It is the capacity for maintenance which is the best test for the vigor and
> stamina of a society.

Why? Personally, I think I'm quite good at maintaining my code, but my office
looks like a mess. The two aspects are totally not correlated, and therefore I
don't know why anyone could make that kind of claim here.

~~~
perl4ever
The capacity and urge for maintenance is a discrete mental capacity which I
sometimes experience, but not often enough. If there was a drug to induce it,
I would want to take it.

While it's true that sometimes I put my efforts into one thing and not
another, I definitely think maintaining things generally is intertwined with
mental health - in fact, the somewhat archaic term "mental hygiene" I've often
thought suggests this. I generally experience an irrational need to
procrastinate that is the opposite of a desire to do maintenance, and I don't
see any positive side to it.

------
stephengillie
As a very cheap way of restoring a device to an optimal state, maintenance
costs are almost like a way to repurchase something without expenses such as
fabrication, assembly, transport, etc. The correct molecules are each already
in the correct locations, making it much cheaper than modifying other
molecules - just restore or replace the most entropic parts.

Described in another HN thread:

> _If you do have a particular attachment to the taste of coffee, consider a
> Keurig ($120-$250) with a reusable filter. Each cup of coffee uses ~1 /3 oz
> of ground coffee, so a 12oz bag ($6-21) gives ~33 cups. With expensive
> coffee, and an expensive machine, at 10 cups per day, after 100 days (1000
> cups), that's $886.36, or $8.86 per day. If you find a cheap machine and
> good, inexpensive coffee, you're looking at $301.82 or $3.02 per day.

Add in $13/300 paper filters for easy and compostable cleaning, and you're
looking at $3.45 - $9.29 per day, depending on your coffee price._ And 32oz of
vinegar for the descaling ($4) for another 1000 cups, increases to $3.47 -
$9.30 per day.[0]

In this way, the $4 of vinegar (and associated labor) is almost like the
$120-250 for a new machine, from a certain point of view.

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17362292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17362292)

