4 ms·

Decoding the innovation delusion, nurturing the maintenance mindset

54 points by samizdis 6y ago

ErikAugust 6y ago
People sell "innovation" at a huge premium. You can make wild projections because there's not a history of past performance to model from. It's like rookie cards. The rookie card of the player who doesn't pan out is briefly worth a lot more than the card of the durable all-star in their seventh year.
hawktheslayer 6y ago
The problem I see at my company is one of incentives. However much as a manager I want my staff to "maintain" and "care", the performance review process rewards people who can "innovate" and build new things. For instance we have hundreds of legacy reports (e.g. a tabular report for the finance dept built in Crystal) that need maintenance and updates, but it's typically easier and more rewarding for a developer to leave that work to someone else and focus their efforts on getting credit for building a new report (a fairly low information visual report build in Tableau for Execs at the company).
- heavenlyblue 6y ago
  Good maintenance approach is innovation. There is no innovation to a 22-year-old coming and rebuilding 90% of the product (the easy part) in <insert your new buzzword here>.
abnry 6y ago
Pushing for innovation is often a part of playing the status game. People pay attention to novelty because it is, in fact, novel. That is, unusual. Novelty also has the potential to benefit one's life in a new way, which is exciting. Of course, keeping the lights on benefits your life, but you take it for granted.
- heavenlyblue 6y ago
  People forget that innovation also costs a lot of money. Rebuilding the old system in a new framework is not innovative, it’s a political power grab even if unintentional. In order to rebuild the old system what you would actually need to do is to prototype with a few approaches and see which sticks. Unfortunately most of the time what happens is that a new “expert” was hired to move everything to Hadoop, because this is what they know better and they don’t want to learn about the current system.
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
I disagree very strongly with this even though I strongly support ideas like “choose boring technology” and “reliability is your number one feature.” The issue is that none of this can be decoupled from politics, and “maintenance first” tells you that the force with political power is some version of a Dilberty group of rent-seeking IT leaders who just want to be paid without having to do much work. That has pros and cons compared to politics driven by product leaders with unrealistic ideas of shipping new features, but at least they have hustle, ambition, animation and lifeforce. I find the trade offs are worse with anti-ambition “maintenance first” IT leaders. Setting IT maintenance as a core strategy, rather than something that serves a strategy, is complete death. Employees better hope they like the dead end career they have at such a company, because it’s going to cut them off from any lifeline to relevancy. The company also better hope they are right in their estimate that a big mass of customers will be satisfied with just maintenance and reliability. If you are in any kind of competitive industry, advanced features or new tech that allows price cuts for your competitor are going to cripple you, and you will be way too slow and dinosaurish to recover or react. Finally “maintenance mode” places tend to pay poorly. Not because innovation is unfairly paid better, but because they want to offer claims (but usually not realities) of work life balance and other fringe benefits, while just pay less, giving crappy 5% bog standard raises, no bonuses. When an employee has hustle and ambition and wants to achieve correspondingly more and produce correspondingly more output in exchange for significant growth in compensation, they’ll just be given a line that they can’t be, in principle, because the company’s fundamental way of working is incremental maintenance. A career goal of ambitious projects is conceptually disallowed, along with any goals of related comp growth. So as a result, you can bet you’ll be working with a bunch of extremely mediocre colleagues, a lot of them only taking a 9-5 job that fits other obligations like family stuff, and figuring they’ve given up on ambition or wealth building and you should too. It reminds me of a famous quote by TS Eliot when he grew sick of university life at Oxford (paraphrasing) > Oxford is very pretty, but I don’t like to be dead.
- spockz 6y ago
  > Setting IT maintenance as a core strategy, rather than something that serves a strategy, is complete death. IMHO, this part is spot on. However, it also does not mean that we should only go for the new, shiny, things. There is great value in maintaining the foundation and keeping it running smoothly so that others can go ahead and build the shiny things. We should just be careful and deliberate in assigning some of the value of that shiny things also to the foundations on which the shiny things were build.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

54 points by samizdis 6y ago

People sell "innovation" at a huge premium. You can make wild projections because there's not a history of past performance to model from. It's like rookie cards. The rookie card of the player who doesn't pan out is briefly worth a lot more than the card of the durable all-star in their seventh year.

hawktheslayer 6y ago

The problem I see at my company is one of incentives. However much as a manager I want my staff to "maintain" and "care", the performance review process rewards people who can "innovate" and build new things. For instance we have hundreds of legacy reports (e.g. a tabular report for the finance dept built in Crystal) that need maintenance and updates, but it's typically easier and more rewarding for a developer to leave that work to someone else and focus their efforts on getting credit for building a new report (a fairly low information visual report build in Tableau for Execs at the company).

heavenlyblue 6y ago
Good maintenance approach is innovation. There is no innovation to a 22-year-old coming and rebuilding 90% of the product (the easy part) in <insert your new buzzword here>.

abnry 6y ago

Pushing for innovation is often a part of playing the status game. People pay attention to novelty because it is, in fact, novel. That is, unusual. Novelty also has the potential to benefit one's life in a new way, which is exciting. Of course, keeping the lights on benefits your life, but you take it for granted.

heavenlyblue 6y ago
People forget that innovation also costs a lot of money. Rebuilding the old system in a new framework is not innovative, it’s a political power grab even if unintentional. In order to rebuild the old system what you would actually need to do is to prototype with a few approaches and see which sticks. Unfortunately most of the time what happens is that a new “expert” was hired to move everything to Hadoop, because this is what they know better and they don’t want to learn about the current system.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

I disagree very strongly with this even though I strongly support ideas like “choose boring technology” and “reliability is your number one feature.” The issue is that none of this can be decoupled from politics, and “maintenance first” tells you that the force with political power is some version of a Dilberty group of rent-seeking IT leaders who just want to be paid without having to do much work. That has pros and cons compared to politics driven by product leaders with unrealistic ideas of shipping new features, but at least they have hustle, ambition, animation and lifeforce. I find the trade offs are worse with anti-ambition “maintenance first” IT leaders. Setting IT maintenance as a core strategy, rather than something that serves a strategy, is complete death. Employees better hope they like the dead end career they have at such a company, because it’s going to cut them off from any lifeline to relevancy. The company also better hope they are right in their estimate that a big mass of customers will be satisfied with just maintenance and reliability. If you are in any kind of competitive industry, advanced features or new tech that allows price cuts for your competitor are going to cripple you, and you will be way too slow and dinosaurish to recover or react. Finally “maintenance mode” places tend to pay poorly. Not because innovation is unfairly paid better, but because they want to offer claims (but usually not realities) of work life balance and other fringe benefits, while just pay less, giving crappy 5% bog standard raises, no bonuses. When an employee has hustle and ambition and wants to achieve correspondingly more and produce correspondingly more output in exchange for significant growth in compensation, they’ll just be given a line that they can’t be, in principle, because the company’s fundamental way of working is incremental maintenance. A career goal of ambitious projects is conceptually disallowed, along with any goals of related comp growth. So as a result, you can bet you’ll be working with a bunch of extremely mediocre colleagues, a lot of them only taking a 9-5 job that fits other obligations like family stuff, and figuring they’ve given up on ambition or wealth building and you should too. It reminds me of a famous quote by TS Eliot when he grew sick of university life at Oxford (paraphrasing) > Oxford is very pretty, but I don’t like to be dead.

spockz 6y ago
> Setting IT maintenance as a core strategy, rather than something that serves a strategy, is complete death. IMHO, this part is spot on. However, it also does not mean that we should only go for the new, shiny, things. There is great value in maintaining the foundation and keeping it running smoothly so that others can go ahead and build the shiny things. We should just be careful and deliberate in assigning some of the value of that shiny things also to the foundations on which the shiny things were build.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]