New software is cool
Engineers and managers pay a lot of attention to developing new applications. Building new software is cool. It is even so cool that a movie was made about the startup phase of Facebook.
New development beats maintenance
What is sometimes forgotten is that everything that is built also has to be maintained. But when an engineer or manager has to choose between working on a new application or maintaining an existing one, the choice is usually made quickly. New development wins. This is strange.
Even innovators depend on maintenance
After all, innovation kings like Netflix and Amazon can only keep their customers satisfied by offering reliable, and therefore well-maintained, services.
The NYT article on maintenance
Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel describe this phenomenon very well in their NYT article Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance!. The article is not even about IT specifically, but about the phenomenon in general. Russell and Vinsel observe that due to a lack of maintenance, public transport often breaks down, drinking water is not drinkable and dams threaten to collapse. In short, innovation is important, but attention for existing applications is just as important.
Most costs go to maintenance
With a bit of back-of-the-envelope reasoning you can see that most of the costs, in the “real construction world” as well as in IT, are attributable to maintenance. Engineers spend most of their day on maintaining existing applications.
A fetish for innovation
Despite the fact that more money and time goes into maintenance, dams collapse, Instagram is sometimes unreachable and you cannot always drink the tap water. How is this possible? Russell and Vinsel think this is because people have a fetish for innovation (“new construction”):
Americans have an impoverished and immature conception of technology, one that fetishizes innovation as a kind of art and demeans upkeep as mere drudgery.
Maintenance gets little recognition
Maintenance is seen as drudgery. It is a side issue and a necessary evil. So it is not strange that people who work on maintenance get little recognition. They are the garbage men who keep the streets clean.
Makers versus menders
Maurice van Wijk pointed me to the blog post Makers vs Menders. In it, Andrea Goulet makes a distinction between engineers who prefer building and engineers who prefer maintaining and improving existing applications. Of course, engineers are not 100% “maker” or 100% “mender”; every engineer has a preference somewhere in between. What I find most important about the blog post is that it puts the terms “maker” and “mender” on the map. The terms sound good and it is clear that they belong together. As an engineer, you would rather be seen as someone who is “mending” than as someone who cleans up the mess like a garbage man.
Will you join me?
I think maintenance (mending) deserves more attention and that using the terms “maker” and “mender” can help to achieve this. Will you join me?