I think it's sad that the vast majority of people in our field (at least in my experience) is so damn excited about building new stuff all the time. There's no appreciation for maintaining, optimizing, and improving existing systems. There's only talk of "adding value" but very little of "keeping value."
So people keep moving on to the next project, leaving the old ones running live but to rot, and at best every once in a while someone will be assigned the dreadful task of having to figure out why the "legacy" (even though it's still fully in operation and servicing customers) system had an outage and can't recover.
Our field suffers from a serious lack of focus. People don't learn to work under constraints. Instead, they prefer to build a whole new thing, full of complexity and hidden issues, just to get around a few nuisances that, with the right mindset, actually force one to be creative (which should make work fun).
I've recently commented here on HN about how I feel like I'm outside the norm on these things [0]. I was happy to learn I'm not alone. I do think those of us who don't mind working on "legacy" systems and perhaps with limited tools are the minority though.
Sometimes it's not even about working on old systems. You work with current tech, build something, and as soon as it's barely deployable, you're expected to move on to the next thing. "It's a great opportunity for your career," they say, "you're gonna get to build something new and make key decisions."
Why does it have to be decided for me? It's my current predicament. I'm working on a project that took me two months to get in the right mindset for and get all the context I needed. I had to try things out, sort out ideas, until I got a clear picture of what to build. Now I've built the first iteration of it. It works, and I'm super excited about it. But it's not done by any means. It needs more features. It needs to be polished so it doesn't make operations miserable running the thing. And yet... I have to move on, and hand it over to someone who doesn't have the same excitement for it that I have, and has maybe 10% of the context.
All because building new things (and adopting The New Hotness, as you say) is what "everyone" wants.
It doesn't help if your career path in a company is tied towards 'visibility,' where certain roles will never see a promotion no matter how critical they are.
I've chosen to take on more than one heavy maintenance job, no client facing visibility in terms of fancy new features. Feedback in performance reviews would always be "it's hard for people to see what you're doing." In the end you have to find your own way to game the system to get appropriately recognised, but of course that kind of office politics isn't really what you want to spend time either.
I'm doing more 'new feature' style work now but I'm happy to not be tumbling through the waves of hype. We get a little bit of new hotness, because of course you need to embrace some aspect of that to avoid stagnating and getting too stuck in your ways, but not so much of it that the engineering team is incentivised to churn through half-assed features.
So people keep moving on to the next project, leaving the old ones running live but to rot, and at best every once in a while someone will be assigned the dreadful task of having to figure out why the "legacy" (even though it's still fully in operation and servicing customers) system had an outage and can't recover.
Our field suffers from a serious lack of focus. People don't learn to work under constraints. Instead, they prefer to build a whole new thing, full of complexity and hidden issues, just to get around a few nuisances that, with the right mindset, actually force one to be creative (which should make work fun).
I've recently commented here on HN about how I feel like I'm outside the norm on these things [0]. I was happy to learn I'm not alone. I do think those of us who don't mind working on "legacy" systems and perhaps with limited tools are the minority though.
Sometimes it's not even about working on old systems. You work with current tech, build something, and as soon as it's barely deployable, you're expected to move on to the next thing. "It's a great opportunity for your career," they say, "you're gonna get to build something new and make key decisions."
Why does it have to be decided for me? It's my current predicament. I'm working on a project that took me two months to get in the right mindset for and get all the context I needed. I had to try things out, sort out ideas, until I got a clear picture of what to build. Now I've built the first iteration of it. It works, and I'm super excited about it. But it's not done by any means. It needs more features. It needs to be polished so it doesn't make operations miserable running the thing. And yet... I have to move on, and hand it over to someone who doesn't have the same excitement for it that I have, and has maybe 10% of the context.
All because building new things (and adopting The New Hotness, as you say) is what "everyone" wants.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25404039