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Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

378 points by ForHackernews 10y ago

Animats 10y ago
"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
- pimlottc 10y ago
  Er, can you explain that last sentence?
  - SIRHAMY 10y ago
    A nail as in its own rack to hang on. Because they value that broom and its mission enough to go through the trouble of creating a rack for it, you could imagine that they put some higher value in that mission (maintenance) and its role in accomplishing it. At least, that's what I got out of it.
    - Animats 10y ago
      It's quite real. TechShop once had racks for their brooms and dustpans. After two moves, the mid-peninsula TechShop lost their broom racks. Maintenance went downhill about that time.
  - pharrlax 10y ago
    That's about when the LSD started kicking in.
- milquetoastaf 10y ago
  >Maintenance is something very, very specifically Western. Yep, no other cultures maintain anything.
  - derefr 10y ago
    Maintaining things coincidentally, and thinking in terms of there being such an activity as "maintenance" that you might want to start doing on any given thing if you aren't doing it already, are different things. I can believe that some cultures have no concept of "Total Cost of Ownership" distinct from purchase price, for example.
  - euske 10y ago
    This is pretty laughable. To me, almost every Western country is half-broken. When I lived in the US, I was surprised how frequent power faults were there. Streets are full of bumps and corroded pipes were everywhere. And in Europe. Do they have any concept of a decent public bathroom over there? Oh, and don't get me started on how badly their trains are operating. I bet that many train accidents are due to the poor maintenance. It's probably true that maintenance is less paid an attention in poor countries, and there are more non-Western countries that are poor. But it's funny that people can get away with a claim like this. It almost sounds like a white supremacist to me. TL;DR: Japan is nice.
    - avn2109 10y ago
      The GP quote contrasts "the West" to Russia, which is itself overwhelmingly White. It's hard to see a white supremacist angle on a comparison between two majority-white blocs.
      - pjc50 10y ago
        In the taxonomy of white supremacists, Russians are "slavic". This was literally part of Hitler's justification for invading eastwards. ("Whiteness" is not simply about skin colour. There's a fascinating/ugly history of how various immigrant groups to America became "white")
    - 10y ago
- AcerbicZero 10y ago
  Hoffer is wrong. He's confusing different military philosophies with this mixed up idea about national identity regarding "maintenance". I don't think anyone would suggest Germany didn't perform a minor miracle by rebuilding as quickly as they did (with massive support), but the Russians went from having half their country burned to the ground, to a world superpower (also with a large amount of support), in a shorter time span than it took West Germany to return to pre-war industrial levels.
  - mee_too 10y ago
    Who supported Russia after the war?
    - Nomentatus 10y ago
      The conquered countries that were stripped of a good part of what they had, largely.
      - e2e4 10y ago
        would appreciate a reference. p.s. many parts of eastern europe has been destroyed during the war as well; and was getting rebuild themselves.
        flohofwoe 10y ago
        Most of what was left of factories in the Soviet occupation zone (the later GDR) was dismantled and moved to the Soviet Union as reparation in the years after WW2. Here's some info in English about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_German_Democratic_Republic#Reparations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_German_Democrat... When I was young I heard a lot of crazy stories about the Russians in Germans (I grew up in the Erzgebirge mountains where the Russians mined the Uranium for their atomic bombs, think of an Eastern 20th century gold rush), some of those stories are how entire production lines were moved onto trains and to the Soviet Union nearly over night (they had a lot of experience with this since a few years earlier the Soviet Union basically moved their entire military production a few thousand kilometers eastward, out of the war zone).
- jalayir 10y ago
  > 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 10y ago
    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.
  - throwaway91111 10y ago
    Reading the quote, it seems the east/west divide is along first/third world rather than the traditional hellenestic divisions. Nonetheless, it does diminish the quotation.
- nine_k 10y ago
  But this measure, Japan proved to be utterly Western. They also recovered brilliantly, as predicted.
carsongross 10y ago
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
- Upvoter33 10y ago
  Generally I would agree. But this past election cycle turned a number of things on its head -- Trump was the "innovator" and HRC clearly the "maintainer". But your point is well taken - it would be so good to get back to two parties, opposed but working together towards a better outcome.
  - whytaka 10y ago
    I don't think it's so clear cut that blue is left is liberal and red is right is conservative (or whatever permutation you want). If you asked a retired Evangelical Christian whether HRC was a radical, what with her gay-love and abortions-for-all banner (I kid), I think they'd agree. But of course, they would've spotted that the "left" have signalled a stronger willingness to go in that direction and have cemented their position over the last 8 years under Obama. Does 8 years make you the establishment? And of course Obama had helped push forward a trade policy concocted as early as the Reagan era. Does 30 years make you the establishment? That just touches upon just two surface level ideas that fragment a person's perspective about these candidates and parties. Painting HRC as the maintainer and Trump the liberal is with too broad a brush.
- Tenhundfeld 10y ago
  Interesting topic, lots of sweeping generalizations being thrown around. Personally, I've found my politics have not changed substantially as I've aged. As a 20 year old, I was liberal, and in my mid-30s with a mortgage and a family, I'm still quite liberal. However, I've found my professional proclivities have changed. I value maintenance and conscientiousness much more than I once did. I think that's due to a few reasons. For one, I've been through a few big rewrites, and inevitably, I've seen them fail or be much harder than anticipated. But also, my focus has shifted from using cool new technologies to delivering value through working software. It's often much less effort to maintain and slowly improve software systems than it is to innovate your way out of a mountain of technical debt. It's hard for businesses to understand this. Often, the expensive "A team" builds new software, while the cheaper "B team" maintains it, but the reality is that in short order, that software will effectively be written by the "B team". Software would last much longer and just function better in general if you kept the "A team" on to maintain, upgrade, refactor, etc. Of course, this isn't totally business's fault, because maintenance is seen as a career killer. So if you try to have the "A team" maintain, many will leave for greener pastures where they get to build new systems in new tools. As an industry, I wish we cared more about the longevity of systems, rather than what new tools are used. We seem to be impressed when we hear someone talk about building a new system in React, Elixir, and Kafka (or whatever's new and shiny at the moment), but nobody wants to hear someone talk about a system they built eight years ago in, say, Java that is still working well, still helping users, still meeting the needs of the business.
draw_down 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Aw, it's just fake internet points. I don't worry about it too much
    - WaxProlix 10y ago
      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".
- watwut 10y ago
  This is the situation where the reason behind downvotes would be appreciated. He/she said the truth - especially for startup environment.
  - mjevans 10y ago
    It is easy to agree. It is difficult to tell if not-agreeing is due to a difference of opinion or the statement being off topic. Thus while it may seem natural to cast to two directions the implicit difference between agreeing or not is actually more nuanced. The /reason/ is important in the latter case.
sammyo 10y ago
Maintainers make the world go round, innovators MAKE the world.
- amelius 10y ago
  Meh, if innovators didn't, somebody else would. As the frontier of knowledge expands, increasingly more low-hanging fruit appears on the horizon.
  - owebmaster 10y ago
    > Meh, if innovators didn't, somebody else would And then this somebody would be an innovator.
    - throwaway91111 10y ago
      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.
  - worldsayshi 10y ago
    If the maintainers didn't make the world go around, somebody else would. Either way those that would have to fill the spots would likely not be as competent in the doing.
    - theparanoid 10y ago
      Without maintenance things decline. Progress is exciting, decay banal. A recent example is the Oroville Dam spillway.
upofadown 10y ago
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...
- cies 10y ago
  "We" hold innovators in high regard because of technology and the way capitalism neeeeeds technology. We live under capitalism so we are taught to love innovation. By maintenance alone a capitalist (person who has so much he no longer needs to work) cannot out run the herd, he needs to innovate because the other capitalists are also innovating. Since labour has already been squeezed to the max, they seek technologies that increase the output of labour, or even "better", make labour obsolete. Workers should be weary of innovation, but they have been taught to love it, and thus they do :)
- throwaway91111 10y ago
  > 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.
sebelk 10y ago
And what about devops? With OpenStack and et al, aren't gurus telling us that maintainance (adminitración) doesn't exist no more?
- eropple 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    The death of devops/sysadmins/infrastructure engineers has been greatly exaggerated within the startup scene.
    - deskamess 10y ago
      That sentiment has actually been stated? I honestly thought it was on the uptrend...
    - eropple 10y ago
      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.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
- jpwgarrison 10y ago
  HAHAHAHAHA, it hurts. OpenStack. It needs maintenance. A lot. Maybe that's what you were after and I missed it, but OpenStack ONLY works if you have an in-house mechanic or 5. If you have less than an FTE to throw at ops, use ESX or qemu/KVM.
bobbington 10y ago
innovators make the money
whack 10y ago
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.
- draw_down 10y ago
  The glamor is fake, the dollars are real. (OK, fine the dollars aren't real either, but what they can buy is.)
  - Radim 10y ago
    I subscribe to the sentiment! As a semi-philosophical aside: in what capacity are dollars not real, but the things you can buy with them are? Since everything seems to be a means to an end, from glamour (gets you money), to money (gets you food) to food (provides energy to your cells) to species (reproduction, evolution) to more efficient use of resources, all accelerating the universal march toward the heat death of the universe. At which point do things in this optimization chain become "real"? What makes a specific segment "not real"?
- vacri 10y ago
  I think you overestimate both the market saturation and lucrativeness of nannies.
  - Trundle 10y ago
    They didn't say anything about how much nannies make.
mlindner 10y ago
I just have to laugh at this title. It's delusional.
deskamess 10y ago
Does Edisons 1% inspiration (innovation) and 99% perspiration (maintenance) apply?
kbutler 10y ago
Innovation changes the world, maintenance keeps it going.
pc2g4d 10y ago
I'd say there's no fine line between maintenance and innovation. Many innovations arise in response to the pains of maintenance.
mentat 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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
acchow 10y ago
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.
rdiddly 10y ago
What about Improvers? Not a word about us? You can innovate while maintaining.
shriphani 10y ago
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.
theprop 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Wouldn't maintainers just be in small social groups, eating fruit and whatever else they happened to collect?
  - theprop 10y ago
    That's hunter-gatherers! That's more than 10,000 years ago before agriculture developed...
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      Sure. How do you get from there to a city without any innovation? How do you even get to a sharp stick without innovation?
      - theprop 10y ago
        Great point!! Yes, exactly!!
lowbloodsugar 10y ago
If maintaining these things is important, might we have to wonder how they came to be?
maehwasu 10y ago
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.
- johnfn 10y ago
  I disagree strongly. Innovation is a replaceable concept. Anybody has innovative ideas. Putting in the years of work to implement them, on the other hand, is rare.
- rusk 10y ago
  I'm not so up-to-date with Basketball, but certainly in Soccer and Rugby you need both. You need the disciplined engine-room of the defence and centre-field to maintain control of the field and prevent concession. At the same time however you won't get anywhere without the big-name points-scorers. Similarly, businesses need the sales guys to go out there and get the customers. But without disciplined design, engineering and maintenance you're going to end up leaking all your revenues in support costs, not to mention intangibles such as reputation.
- rcjones 10y ago
  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.
shade23 10y ago
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.
spc476 10y ago
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
cgio 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - cgio 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        Well, maintenance is what you do to avoid (negative) change. Changing requirements or improvements are not maintenance.
rusk 10y ago
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.html https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/thomasaed104931....
golergka 10y ago
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.
wjke2i9 10y ago
> 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_linux/transcript?language=en#t-1001151 https://www.ted.com/talks/linus_torvalds_the_mind_behind_lin...
- Qwertious 10y ago
  Also: >"WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!" In response to the notion that we need to break userspace in the name of progress/innovation.
madenine 10y ago
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."
danielam 10y ago
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.
frabbit 10y ago
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
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

378 points by ForHackernews 10y ago

"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

pimlottc 10y ago
Er, can you explain that last sentence?
- SIRHAMY 10y ago
  A nail as in its own rack to hang on. Because they value that broom and its mission enough to go through the trouble of creating a rack for it, you could imagine that they put some higher value in that mission (maintenance) and its role in accomplishing it. At least, that's what I got out of it.
  - Animats 10y ago
    It's quite real. TechShop once had racks for their brooms and dustpans. After two moves, the mid-peninsula TechShop lost their broom racks. Maintenance went downhill about that time.
- pharrlax 10y ago
  That's about when the LSD started kicking in.
milquetoastaf 10y ago
>Maintenance is something very, very specifically Western. Yep, no other cultures maintain anything.
- derefr 10y ago
  Maintaining things coincidentally, and thinking in terms of there being such an activity as "maintenance" that you might want to start doing on any given thing if you aren't doing it already, are different things. I can believe that some cultures have no concept of "Total Cost of Ownership" distinct from purchase price, for example.
- euske 10y ago
  This is pretty laughable. To me, almost every Western country is half-broken. When I lived in the US, I was surprised how frequent power faults were there. Streets are full of bumps and corroded pipes were everywhere. And in Europe. Do they have any concept of a decent public bathroom over there? Oh, and don't get me started on how badly their trains are operating. I bet that many train accidents are due to the poor maintenance. It's probably true that maintenance is less paid an attention in poor countries, and there are more non-Western countries that are poor. But it's funny that people can get away with a claim like this. It almost sounds like a white supremacist to me. TL;DR: Japan is nice.
  - avn2109 10y ago
    The GP quote contrasts "the West" to Russia, which is itself overwhelmingly White. It's hard to see a white supremacist angle on a comparison between two majority-white blocs.
    - pjc50 10y ago
      In the taxonomy of white supremacists, Russians are "slavic". This was literally part of Hitler's justification for invading eastwards. ("Whiteness" is not simply about skin colour. There's a fascinating/ugly history of how various immigrant groups to America became "white")
  - 10y ago
AcerbicZero 10y ago
Hoffer is wrong. He's confusing different military philosophies with this mixed up idea about national identity regarding "maintenance". I don't think anyone would suggest Germany didn't perform a minor miracle by rebuilding as quickly as they did (with massive support), but the Russians went from having half their country burned to the ground, to a world superpower (also with a large amount of support), in a shorter time span than it took West Germany to return to pre-war industrial levels.
- mee_too 10y ago
  Who supported Russia after the war?
  - Nomentatus 10y ago
    The conquered countries that were stripped of a good part of what they had, largely.
    - e2e4 10y ago
      would appreciate a reference. p.s. many parts of eastern europe has been destroyed during the war as well; and was getting rebuild themselves.
      - flohofwoe 10y ago
        Most of what was left of factories in the Soviet occupation zone (the later GDR) was dismantled and moved to the Soviet Union as reparation in the years after WW2. Here's some info in English about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_German_Democratic_Republic#Reparations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_German_Democrat... When I was young I heard a lot of crazy stories about the Russians in Germans (I grew up in the Erzgebirge mountains where the Russians mined the Uranium for their atomic bombs, think of an Eastern 20th century gold rush), some of those stories are how entire production lines were moved onto trains and to the Soviet Union nearly over night (they had a lot of experience with this since a few years earlier the Soviet Union basically moved their entire military production a few thousand kilometers eastward, out of the war zone).
jalayir 10y ago
> 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 10y ago
  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.
- throwaway91111 10y ago
  Reading the quote, it seems the east/west divide is along first/third world rather than the traditional hellenestic divisions. Nonetheless, it does diminish the quotation.
nine_k 10y ago
But this measure, Japan proved to be utterly Western. They also recovered brilliantly, as predicted.

carsongross 10y ago

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

Upvoter33 10y ago
Generally I would agree. But this past election cycle turned a number of things on its head -- Trump was the "innovator" and HRC clearly the "maintainer". But your point is well taken - it would be so good to get back to two parties, opposed but working together towards a better outcome.
- whytaka 10y ago
  I don't think it's so clear cut that blue is left is liberal and red is right is conservative (or whatever permutation you want). If you asked a retired Evangelical Christian whether HRC was a radical, what with her gay-love and abortions-for-all banner (I kid), I think they'd agree. But of course, they would've spotted that the "left" have signalled a stronger willingness to go in that direction and have cemented their position over the last 8 years under Obama. Does 8 years make you the establishment? And of course Obama had helped push forward a trade policy concocted as early as the Reagan era. Does 30 years make you the establishment? That just touches upon just two surface level ideas that fragment a person's perspective about these candidates and parties. Painting HRC as the maintainer and Trump the liberal is with too broad a brush.
Tenhundfeld 10y ago
Interesting topic, lots of sweeping generalizations being thrown around. Personally, I've found my politics have not changed substantially as I've aged. As a 20 year old, I was liberal, and in my mid-30s with a mortgage and a family, I'm still quite liberal. However, I've found my professional proclivities have changed. I value maintenance and conscientiousness much more than I once did. I think that's due to a few reasons. For one, I've been through a few big rewrites, and inevitably, I've seen them fail or be much harder than anticipated. But also, my focus has shifted from using cool new technologies to delivering value through working software. It's often much less effort to maintain and slowly improve software systems than it is to innovate your way out of a mountain of technical debt. It's hard for businesses to understand this. Often, the expensive "A team" builds new software, while the cheaper "B team" maintains it, but the reality is that in short order, that software will effectively be written by the "B team". Software would last much longer and just function better in general if you kept the "A team" on to maintain, upgrade, refactor, etc. Of course, this isn't totally business's fault, because maintenance is seen as a career killer. So if you try to have the "A team" maintain, many will leave for greener pastures where they get to build new systems in new tools. As an industry, I wish we cared more about the longevity of systems, rather than what new tools are used. We seem to be impressed when we hear someone talk about building a new system in React, Elixir, and Kafka (or whatever's new and shiny at the moment), but nobody wants to hear someone talk about a system they built eight years ago in, say, Java that is still working well, still helping users, still meeting the needs of the business.

draw_down 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Aw, it's just fake internet points. I don't worry about it too much
  - WaxProlix 10y ago
    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".
watwut 10y ago
This is the situation where the reason behind downvotes would be appreciated. He/she said the truth - especially for startup environment.
- mjevans 10y ago
  It is easy to agree. It is difficult to tell if not-agreeing is due to a difference of opinion or the statement being off topic. Thus while it may seem natural to cast to two directions the implicit difference between agreeing or not is actually more nuanced. The /reason/ is important in the latter case.

sammyo 10y ago

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

amelius 10y ago
Meh, if innovators didn't, somebody else would. As the frontier of knowledge expands, increasingly more low-hanging fruit appears on the horizon.
- owebmaster 10y ago
  > Meh, if innovators didn't, somebody else would And then this somebody would be an innovator.
  - throwaway91111 10y ago
    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.
- worldsayshi 10y ago
  If the maintainers didn't make the world go around, somebody else would. Either way those that would have to fill the spots would likely not be as competent in the doing.
  - theparanoid 10y ago
    Without maintenance things decline. Progress is exciting, decay banal. A recent example is the Oroville Dam spillway.

upofadown 10y ago

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...

cies 10y ago
"We" hold innovators in high regard because of technology and the way capitalism neeeeeds technology. We live under capitalism so we are taught to love innovation. By maintenance alone a capitalist (person who has so much he no longer needs to work) cannot out run the herd, he needs to innovate because the other capitalists are also innovating. Since labour has already been squeezed to the max, they seek technologies that increase the output of labour, or even "better", make labour obsolete. Workers should be weary of innovation, but they have been taught to love it, and thus they do :)
throwaway91111 10y ago
> 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.

sebelk 10y ago

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

eropple 10y ago
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 10y ago
  The death of devops/sysadmins/infrastructure engineers has been greatly exaggerated within the startup scene.
  - deskamess 10y ago
    That sentiment has actually been stated? I honestly thought it was on the uptrend...
  - eropple 10y ago
    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.
    - deleted 10y ago
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jpwgarrison 10y ago
HAHAHAHAHA, it hurts. OpenStack. It needs maintenance. A lot. Maybe that's what you were after and I missed it, but OpenStack ONLY works if you have an in-house mechanic or 5. If you have less than an FTE to throw at ops, use ESX or qemu/KVM.

bobbington 10y ago

innovators make the money

whack 10y ago

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.

draw_down 10y ago
The glamor is fake, the dollars are real. (OK, fine the dollars aren't real either, but what they can buy is.)
- Radim 10y ago
  I subscribe to the sentiment! As a semi-philosophical aside: in what capacity are dollars not real, but the things you can buy with them are? Since everything seems to be a means to an end, from glamour (gets you money), to money (gets you food) to food (provides energy to your cells) to species (reproduction, evolution) to more efficient use of resources, all accelerating the universal march toward the heat death of the universe. At which point do things in this optimization chain become "real"? What makes a specific segment "not real"?
vacri 10y ago
I think you overestimate both the market saturation and lucrativeness of nannies.
- Trundle 10y ago
  They didn't say anything about how much nannies make.

mlindner 10y ago

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

deskamess 10y ago

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

kbutler 10y ago

Innovation changes the world, maintenance keeps it going.

pc2g4d 10y ago

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

mentat 10y ago

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 10y ago
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

acchow 10y ago

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.

rdiddly 10y ago

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

shriphani 10y ago

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.

theprop 10y ago

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 10y ago
Wouldn't maintainers just be in small social groups, eating fruit and whatever else they happened to collect?
- theprop 10y ago
  That's hunter-gatherers! That's more than 10,000 years ago before agriculture developed...
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Sure. How do you get from there to a city without any innovation? How do you even get to a sharp stick without innovation?
    - theprop 10y ago
      Great point!! Yes, exactly!!

lowbloodsugar 10y ago

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

maehwasu 10y ago

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.

johnfn 10y ago
I disagree strongly. Innovation is a replaceable concept. Anybody has innovative ideas. Putting in the years of work to implement them, on the other hand, is rare.
rusk 10y ago
I'm not so up-to-date with Basketball, but certainly in Soccer and Rugby you need both. You need the disciplined engine-room of the defence and centre-field to maintain control of the field and prevent concession. At the same time however you won't get anywhere without the big-name points-scorers. Similarly, businesses need the sales guys to go out there and get the customers. But without disciplined design, engineering and maintenance you're going to end up leaking all your revenues in support costs, not to mention intangibles such as reputation.
rcjones 10y ago
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.

shade23 10y ago

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.

spc476 10y ago

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

cgio 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.
- deleted 10y ago
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- cgio 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      Well, maintenance is what you do to avoid (negative) change. Changing requirements or improvements are not maintenance.

rusk 10y ago

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.html https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/thomasaed104931....

golergka 10y ago

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.

wjke2i9 10y ago

> 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_linux/transcript?language=en#t-1001151 https://www.ted.com/talks/linus_torvalds_the_mind_behind_lin...

Qwertious 10y ago
Also: >"WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!" In response to the notion that we need to break userspace in the name of progress/innovation.

madenine 10y ago

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."

danielam 10y ago

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.

frabbit 10y ago

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

deleted 10y ago

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