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I think in general the human mind treats Maintenance as less important or not important at all. The ancient people realized this: When I studied Chinese in prim

I think in general the human mind treats Maintenance as less important or not important at all. The ancient people realized this: When I studied Chinese in primary school, there was one ancient text that spoke about a discussion between a king and a famous doctor. The doctor explained that his brother was superior than him in the medical science but no one heard about him because he could always treat small illnesses before then evolved into terminal ones, so people said, "Oh he is a fine doctor, but he only treats minor illnesses". This text has been resonating with me for many years. Humans simply do NOT appreciate maintenance people TBH. Me as an example: I own a house but whenever I plan maintenance of my house I always tried to push it a bit further because 1) It's expensive, and 2) Manual or company says that I need to do X every Y years, can I push back say 10% and still don't break things? As for my electronics, unfortunately I never maintained them and in my earlier days I never had a computer that lasted for 3+ years -- they always broke down due to this or that reason. And then both of my knees have degenerative issues; I had kidney stones; I need to maintain physical health but I was and still is too lazy to do that. I simply do not have the maintenance mindset. This probably can stretch out to the whole society: We simply do not appreciate Maintenance people. They are usually lowly paid and have low moral because what they work is chore. They also do not get to enjoy creating new things. Basically you need someone who has the mindset to appreciate maintenance to be a good maintenance person, and a society of this mindset to support such work and lower the cost. Nowadays we do not. Nowadays we always doubt the necessity of maintenance and sometimes even accuse other people to charge a large bill for maintenance (sadly, this could be true). There is little trust between.

hindsightbias 4y ago
When I started as a CS graduate, I was thrilled to be on a complex project as a lowly maintainer. I dove into that code and learned how stuff worked. People avoided those areas because it was too dirty, scary or hard sounding. That's the story of my career. Pick a popular project and be a fish in big pond or pick something others stayed away from and own it. Our future is going to be a shitstorm of breakage. Covid should have taught us a lesson but we're going to go on while infrastructure (physical and virtual) starts to break and no Top 10 grad is going to want to touch it. You're not going to have a choice about plumbing or roof leaks - nobody is coming for a week and you are on your own. On your knees - I look at my classmates now and consider HS sports to be child abuse. My coworkers talk about their kids surgeries. Those 4 or 5 people boarding your plane in wheelchairs now? It's going to be 3X that in a decade. But that'll be fine, because you'll have to wait a couple hours for the rare pilot to show up.
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  > I look at my classmates now and consider HS sports to be child abuse. It's a serious risk, but the risk-reward is still positive when it comes to the value of youth sports. Do you disagree strongly with this?
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    I disagree with the risk reward of contact sports, especially if your kid is smaller than average. Anything where the brain collides with the skull is an obvious no (American football, soccer headers, etc).
- nebula8804 4y ago
  >Our future is going to be a shitstorm of breakage. Covid should have taught us a lesson but we're going to go on while infrastructure (physical and virtual) starts to break and no Top 10 grad is going to want to touch it. You're not going to have a choice about plumbing or roof leaks - nobody is coming for a week and you are on your own. Its already happening. It feels like a slow collapse. I am trying to maintain my 16 year old car because it is low milage and I just don't want to pay the absurd prices for a new car until maybe next year (especially a Mazda which I like but not at that price). My trusty mechanic has had so many labor issues that while he provides me good service even he is slipping. I've been teaching myself car repair so I can do more and more myself because I know it will be done right and with extreme care. I see the same happening to local hospitals and doctors offices. I've had to bring parents there or go there myself a few times this year and I can clearly see the degradation in service. I can't do anything about this compared to the car other than take really good care of myself and hope for the best. Same applies to all of retail. The quality of all mass market stuff just seems worse and worse as time goes on. I was observing this while having a bagel and coffee from Dunkin. Everyone is just flat out "over it".
  - abdabab 4y ago
    > I've been teaching myself car repair so I can do more and more myself because I know it will be done right and with extreme care. Is there a book you’d recommend? I want to learn car repair as well.
lotsofpulp 4y ago
This is not something new. It is simply a matter of discipline, and choosing long term rewards over short term rewards. And people have been choosing short term rewards for many generations and probably all of humanity, even when they know otherwise. Everyone knows to eat and drink less/better and exercise more, but few do it, because it is not fun.
- hnthrowaway0328 4y ago
  It's a bit more complicated for the other projects I guess. We never know for sure if the budget is correct or too inflated to satisfy certain interest groups. We don't even know if it is necessary to do X at this moment. Of course we can probably blindly trust the engineers who certified on the reports (because civil engineers are true engineers while software engineers are not?).
nebula8804 4y ago
As I enter my mid 30s and am now a year into taking care of my late father's house, I have come to realize that maintenance can really take up so much of your free time that it often feels like its never ending. Its as if when one thing is fixed or "refurbished" the next thing breaks or changes its behavior immediately right after. It can be overwhelming to overcome all this entropy. Seems as if the only way to really reduce a maintenance burden is to simplify your life more and more including the things in your life. But then you are still having to take care of your body and if you have a family others as well. I can understand a society that has FOMO will put maintenance on the backburner. There just isn't enough time to have your cake and eat it too in our modern world it seems.
- balaji1 4y ago
  Maintenance should be outsourced a lot more. As in get pros to come and fix things. Maintenance doesn't seem much in demand in the US in a residential/consumer context, probably because it is expensive and other reasons like the grandparent comment: > We simply do not appreciate Maintenance people... Maintenance and service is much more common in India. There are young and old folks in a thriving industry for repairs and maintenance. You will see they are super knowledgable in their vocation and they get stuff fixed well and quick. Though I do think these industries are shrinking in India - i.e "catching up" to the West. In the US, middle-class probably only services cars and heavy equipment at home. And more things are manufactured to not be maintained but replaced - a weird example is mattresses and pillows. Of course there must be a lot more servicing happening in non-residential contexts, both in the West and in India. > simplify your life more and more including the things in your life This is such an underrated hack. Can't find it now - but think there is a Naval tweet about how getting rid of things is a huge help for creating peace in life.
  - amatecha 4y ago
    I've found that the problem is, the pros typically won't do a better job than I would do myself. In fact, I got my uncle to fix my fridge after numerous places simply said "we don't repair fridges" (despite being an "appliance repair" company), another place thought it was a certain failed component, another thought it was a different part -- until they replaced that part and found that another part had a problem.. then they found the ACTUAL cause of the problem, a clogged tube. Which they don't/can't fix. Meanwhile, I find a video of a guy literally working on side of the road in India who clears this tube nearly effortlessly in like 5 minutes. "Professionals" are often just "a company that happens to officially do the thing you want", but the degree of craftsmanship is frequently absolutely pathetic. Oh yeah, one of those fridge repair places scratched the hell out of my floor by dragging the fridge without placing a protective plexiglass/plastic down first. It's like no one cares to do a good, thorough job anymore.
GartzenDeHaes 4y ago
The same is true for managers. The manager whose project is late and over budget, but whips their staff into working long hours is seen as a decisive hard charger. On time and on budget projects must be easy and the managers of such projects are seen as weak and unambitious.
godelski 4y ago
> I think in general the human mind treats Maintenance as less important or not important at all. I think you're probably right. As another simple example, I like to actually keep a pretty clean house. I know that this frustrates roommates or other people I live with but it actually takes very little work to keep the house clean (I'm honestly a pretty lazy person). My motto is "It is far easier to _keep_ things clean than it is to _make_ things clean later." It is amazing how far just wiping up a mess when it is made goes to keeping things clean. Takes 5 seconds if you do it after the mess is made but 15 minutes if you wait. Or just simple maintenance things like once a week spray your shower with bleach water 15 minutes before you get in (and rinse the walls). (Obviously there's exceptions to the "clean now" "rules" because schedules get tight and that's not always possible. So I just want to make it clear I'm not harassing people. I just don't want a stove top covered in oil or garbage littered in the house) I think this style of maintenance extends well beyond cleanliness or health. We also probably undervalue it because we're also pretty well known to be bad at future planning. It is basically the Marshmallow Experiment. For cleaning (or most maintenance tasks) the cost is little now but requires effort now while the cost is higher in the future but you're able to put off the effort. Problem being that we view future costs/rewards as smaller than immediate costs/rewards. I always wonder how much faster humans could progress if we were able to more accurately internalize future costs/rewards into our mental models (even just a small improvement).
- joncrocks 4y ago
  What's the easiest way to clean? Not make a mess in the first place.
- robocat 4y ago
  > the Marshmallow Experiment “The original marshmallow test, it turned out, had a flaw. Exclude some children from better-off families (which seems to make them both more willing to delay gratification and more likely to succeed in later life) and much of its predictive power suddenly disappears.” — quote from an economist piece.
  - sethammons 4y ago
rjzzleep 4y ago
I would say it's a very americentric world view. There are a lot of cultures who are the opposite. Or who were the opposite and increasingly turned into a more consumeristic society. I'm not a person that is particularly good at maintenance, but compared to friends I've had from London or bigger US and Canadian cities I've seen a lot of people very surprised when I decided to fix things instead of just buying a new one. Even if its just a 20 buck wallet with a broken seam. I can already imagine a bunch of people here saying to themselves my hourly rate is worth much more than this 20 bucks wallet and yes, so is mine, but there is something pleasing about not throwing everything away at the first sign of wear. When you say "Humans simple do NOT" what you really mean is "MY demographic does not". Even in the US or Canada that is very much dependent on the area and the demographic you grew up. I am not at all surprised that people who's only goal in life is to make as much money as people in the valley and who buy a new iphone every 1 or 2 years find the act of maintaining things insane. Unfortunately this problem has seeped through society in which I would call the proliferation of business school graduates who are now at the top of most business chains and who have traded any long term benefit for short term gains.
- kiliantics 4y ago
  Things that are maintained usually have more character. That wooly jumper with the elbow patches or that old motorcycle that's had the engine rebuilt. Of course nowadays people will just opt to buy the new version of something that is made to look like it was old and remade. But the old things were usually of better quality materials and the idiosyncratic details of a maintainer simply can't be recreated in something new and mass produced.
  - rjzzleep 4y ago
    Completely agree, but at the same time a lot of people (myself included) criticize Germans for being terrible customers, because they expect things they buy to last a very long time, be repairable and also cheap. I.e. they don't buy often. Contrast that to how Americans are considered to be "good consumers".
  - laserlight 4y ago
CalRobert 4y ago
Just out of curiosity, what maintenance would a computer need? Dusting?
- CapitalistCartr 4y ago
  Everwhere I've worked, when I open up a PC, I unplug cables, carry it out to the nearest airhose and (carefully) blow out the mess.
danhau 4y ago
On Reddit, I think I saw the meme version of what you write here. It summarizes it quite good. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/xma9ad/im_just_gonna_leave_this_here/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&utm_term=link https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/xma9ad/im_...
tnel77 4y ago
This comic seems relevant: https://workchronicles.substack.com/p/comic-prevention-vs-cure https://workchronicles.substack.com/p/comic-prevention-vs-cu...
brabel 4y ago
Have you ever worked in Maintenance? I worked on industrial maintenance for 7 years. While some of what you say is true, there's a lot wrong. > They are usually lowly paid and have low moral because what they work is chore. Not the case for me or anyone I worked with. The pay was very good. We had skills that were very hard to replace (PLC programming, high-tech press fitting, experience on very large machines that were basically one of a kind, so you can't just take people from other companies that have the same thing or even close). Morale was high because even though engineers and managers don't respect us, we didn't respect them either so we could almost do anything we wanted! Which was ok because we were more needed than they were... one day off for us cost millions to the company if a machine stopped working (an engineer could take a week off and no one noticed). > They also do not get to enjoy creating new things. In some shitty companies maybe... I was able to design from scratch large machines that we then proceeded to build and use in production. Really cool stuff that I really loved. My last job in maintenance let me spend most of my time writing software for the maintenance inventory, which was hard to keep up-to-date and off-the-shelf software for that was very expensive... despite us having fairly simple needs (which is why was able to write it myself using a mix of VBA and MS Access... this was a long time ago). After that, I noticed I could do software and started going to uni for a Compute Science degree. Which I attended WHILE working in maintenance as the job was mostly waiting for shit to happen so I had lots of "free" time. Took me around 10 years in software to start earning substantially more than I used to in maintenance. I did it mostly to avoid the shit parts of the job: cleaning shit, changing oil, greasing gears and what not... that part was not fun.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
It's the great squeaky wheel gets the oil management problem. A service that hums along quietly gets its budget cut. A dumpster fire that produces tickets and visible fixes/hero moments gets a big budget re-up. The basic issue is of course inability to predict the future, inability of management to properly judge things, etc. Management is: Charitable version: full of people that necessarily cannot have full context/detail and must make quick high-level decisions Not Charitable version: full of sociopaths whose primary job is to maintain or improve standing, and secondary concern is making good long term decisions for a company, so cutting maintenance or spinning slapdash solutions and failures as epic wins is more effective.

hindsightbias 4y ago

When I started as a CS graduate, I was thrilled to be on a complex project as a lowly maintainer. I dove into that code and learned how stuff worked. People avoided those areas because it was too dirty, scary or hard sounding. That's the story of my career. Pick a popular project and be a fish in big pond or pick something others stayed away from and own it. Our future is going to be a shitstorm of breakage. Covid should have taught us a lesson but we're going to go on while infrastructure (physical and virtual) starts to break and no Top 10 grad is going to want to touch it. You're not going to have a choice about plumbing or roof leaks - nobody is coming for a week and you are on your own. On your knees - I look at my classmates now and consider HS sports to be child abuse. My coworkers talk about their kids surgeries. Those 4 or 5 people boarding your plane in wheelchairs now? It's going to be 3X that in a decade. But that'll be fine, because you'll have to wait a couple hours for the rare pilot to show up.

DiggyJohnson 4y ago
> I look at my classmates now and consider HS sports to be child abuse. It's a serious risk, but the risk-reward is still positive when it comes to the value of youth sports. Do you disagree strongly with this?
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  I disagree with the risk reward of contact sports, especially if your kid is smaller than average. Anything where the brain collides with the skull is an obvious no (American football, soccer headers, etc).
nebula8804 4y ago
>Our future is going to be a shitstorm of breakage. Covid should have taught us a lesson but we're going to go on while infrastructure (physical and virtual) starts to break and no Top 10 grad is going to want to touch it. You're not going to have a choice about plumbing or roof leaks - nobody is coming for a week and you are on your own. Its already happening. It feels like a slow collapse. I am trying to maintain my 16 year old car because it is low milage and I just don't want to pay the absurd prices for a new car until maybe next year (especially a Mazda which I like but not at that price). My trusty mechanic has had so many labor issues that while he provides me good service even he is slipping. I've been teaching myself car repair so I can do more and more myself because I know it will be done right and with extreme care. I see the same happening to local hospitals and doctors offices. I've had to bring parents there or go there myself a few times this year and I can clearly see the degradation in service. I can't do anything about this compared to the car other than take really good care of myself and hope for the best. Same applies to all of retail. The quality of all mass market stuff just seems worse and worse as time goes on. I was observing this while having a bagel and coffee from Dunkin. Everyone is just flat out "over it".
- abdabab 4y ago
  > I've been teaching myself car repair so I can do more and more myself because I know it will be done right and with extreme care. Is there a book you’d recommend? I want to learn car repair as well.

lotsofpulp 4y ago

This is not something new. It is simply a matter of discipline, and choosing long term rewards over short term rewards. And people have been choosing short term rewards for many generations and probably all of humanity, even when they know otherwise. Everyone knows to eat and drink less/better and exercise more, but few do it, because it is not fun.

hnthrowaway0328 4y ago
It's a bit more complicated for the other projects I guess. We never know for sure if the budget is correct or too inflated to satisfy certain interest groups. We don't even know if it is necessary to do X at this moment. Of course we can probably blindly trust the engineers who certified on the reports (because civil engineers are true engineers while software engineers are not?).

nebula8804 4y ago

As I enter my mid 30s and am now a year into taking care of my late father's house, I have come to realize that maintenance can really take up so much of your free time that it often feels like its never ending. Its as if when one thing is fixed or "refurbished" the next thing breaks or changes its behavior immediately right after. It can be overwhelming to overcome all this entropy. Seems as if the only way to really reduce a maintenance burden is to simplify your life more and more including the things in your life. But then you are still having to take care of your body and if you have a family others as well. I can understand a society that has FOMO will put maintenance on the backburner. There just isn't enough time to have your cake and eat it too in our modern world it seems.

balaji1 4y ago
Maintenance should be outsourced a lot more. As in get pros to come and fix things. Maintenance doesn't seem much in demand in the US in a residential/consumer context, probably because it is expensive and other reasons like the grandparent comment: > We simply do not appreciate Maintenance people... Maintenance and service is much more common in India. There are young and old folks in a thriving industry for repairs and maintenance. You will see they are super knowledgable in their vocation and they get stuff fixed well and quick. Though I do think these industries are shrinking in India - i.e "catching up" to the West. In the US, middle-class probably only services cars and heavy equipment at home. And more things are manufactured to not be maintained but replaced - a weird example is mattresses and pillows. Of course there must be a lot more servicing happening in non-residential contexts, both in the West and in India. > simplify your life more and more including the things in your life This is such an underrated hack. Can't find it now - but think there is a Naval tweet about how getting rid of things is a huge help for creating peace in life.
- amatecha 4y ago
  I've found that the problem is, the pros typically won't do a better job than I would do myself. In fact, I got my uncle to fix my fridge after numerous places simply said "we don't repair fridges" (despite being an "appliance repair" company), another place thought it was a certain failed component, another thought it was a different part -- until they replaced that part and found that another part had a problem.. then they found the ACTUAL cause of the problem, a clogged tube. Which they don't/can't fix. Meanwhile, I find a video of a guy literally working on side of the road in India who clears this tube nearly effortlessly in like 5 minutes. "Professionals" are often just "a company that happens to officially do the thing you want", but the degree of craftsmanship is frequently absolutely pathetic. Oh yeah, one of those fridge repair places scratched the hell out of my floor by dragging the fridge without placing a protective plexiglass/plastic down first. It's like no one cares to do a good, thorough job anymore.

GartzenDeHaes 4y ago

The same is true for managers. The manager whose project is late and over budget, but whips their staff into working long hours is seen as a decisive hard charger. On time and on budget projects must be easy and the managers of such projects are seen as weak and unambitious.

godelski 4y ago

> I think in general the human mind treats Maintenance as less important or not important at all. I think you're probably right. As another simple example, I like to actually keep a pretty clean house. I know that this frustrates roommates or other people I live with but it actually takes very little work to keep the house clean (I'm honestly a pretty lazy person). My motto is "It is far easier to _keep_ things clean than it is to _make_ things clean later." It is amazing how far just wiping up a mess when it is made goes to keeping things clean. Takes 5 seconds if you do it after the mess is made but 15 minutes if you wait. Or just simple maintenance things like once a week spray your shower with bleach water 15 minutes before you get in (and rinse the walls). (Obviously there's exceptions to the "clean now" "rules" because schedules get tight and that's not always possible. So I just want to make it clear I'm not harassing people. I just don't want a stove top covered in oil or garbage littered in the house) I think this style of maintenance extends well beyond cleanliness or health. We also probably undervalue it because we're also pretty well known to be bad at future planning. It is basically the Marshmallow Experiment. For cleaning (or most maintenance tasks) the cost is little now but requires effort now while the cost is higher in the future but you're able to put off the effort. Problem being that we view future costs/rewards as smaller than immediate costs/rewards. I always wonder how much faster humans could progress if we were able to more accurately internalize future costs/rewards into our mental models (even just a small improvement).

joncrocks 4y ago
What's the easiest way to clean? Not make a mess in the first place.
robocat 4y ago
> the Marshmallow Experiment “The original marshmallow test, it turned out, had a flaw. Exclude some children from better-off families (which seems to make them both more willing to delay gratification and more likely to succeed in later life) and much of its predictive power suddenly disappears.” — quote from an economist piece.
- sethammons 4y ago

rjzzleep 4y ago

I would say it's a very americentric world view. There are a lot of cultures who are the opposite. Or who were the opposite and increasingly turned into a more consumeristic society. I'm not a person that is particularly good at maintenance, but compared to friends I've had from London or bigger US and Canadian cities I've seen a lot of people very surprised when I decided to fix things instead of just buying a new one. Even if its just a 20 buck wallet with a broken seam. I can already imagine a bunch of people here saying to themselves my hourly rate is worth much more than this 20 bucks wallet and yes, so is mine, but there is something pleasing about not throwing everything away at the first sign of wear. When you say "Humans simple do NOT" what you really mean is "MY demographic does not". Even in the US or Canada that is very much dependent on the area and the demographic you grew up. I am not at all surprised that people who's only goal in life is to make as much money as people in the valley and who buy a new iphone every 1 or 2 years find the act of maintaining things insane. Unfortunately this problem has seeped through society in which I would call the proliferation of business school graduates who are now at the top of most business chains and who have traded any long term benefit for short term gains.

kiliantics 4y ago
Things that are maintained usually have more character. That wooly jumper with the elbow patches or that old motorcycle that's had the engine rebuilt. Of course nowadays people will just opt to buy the new version of something that is made to look like it was old and remade. But the old things were usually of better quality materials and the idiosyncratic details of a maintainer simply can't be recreated in something new and mass produced.
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  Completely agree, but at the same time a lot of people (myself included) criticize Germans for being terrible customers, because they expect things they buy to last a very long time, be repairable and also cheap. I.e. they don't buy often. Contrast that to how Americans are considered to be "good consumers".
- laserlight 4y ago

CalRobert 4y ago

Just out of curiosity, what maintenance would a computer need? Dusting?

CapitalistCartr 4y ago
Everwhere I've worked, when I open up a PC, I unplug cables, carry it out to the nearest airhose and (carefully) blow out the mess.

danhau 4y ago

On Reddit, I think I saw the meme version of what you write here. It summarizes it quite good. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/xma9ad/im_just_gonna_leave_this_here/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&utm_term=link https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/xma9ad/im_...

tnel77 4y ago

This comic seems relevant: https://workchronicles.substack.com/p/comic-prevention-vs-cure https://workchronicles.substack.com/p/comic-prevention-vs-cu...

brabel 4y ago

Have you ever worked in Maintenance? I worked on industrial maintenance for 7 years. While some of what you say is true, there's a lot wrong. > They are usually lowly paid and have low moral because what they work is chore. Not the case for me or anyone I worked with. The pay was very good. We had skills that were very hard to replace (PLC programming, high-tech press fitting, experience on very large machines that were basically one of a kind, so you can't just take people from other companies that have the same thing or even close). Morale was high because even though engineers and managers don't respect us, we didn't respect them either so we could almost do anything we wanted! Which was ok because we were more needed than they were... one day off for us cost millions to the company if a machine stopped working (an engineer could take a week off and no one noticed). > They also do not get to enjoy creating new things. In some shitty companies maybe... I was able to design from scratch large machines that we then proceeded to build and use in production. Really cool stuff that I really loved. My last job in maintenance let me spend most of my time writing software for the maintenance inventory, which was hard to keep up-to-date and off-the-shelf software for that was very expensive... despite us having fairly simple needs (which is why was able to write it myself using a mix of VBA and MS Access... this was a long time ago). After that, I noticed I could do software and started going to uni for a Compute Science degree. Which I attended WHILE working in maintenance as the job was mostly waiting for shit to happen so I had lots of "free" time. Took me around 10 years in software to start earning substantially more than I used to in maintenance. I did it mostly to avoid the shit parts of the job: cleaning shit, changing oil, greasing gears and what not... that part was not fun.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

It's the great squeaky wheel gets the oil management problem. A service that hums along quietly gets its budget cut. A dumpster fire that produces tickets and visible fixes/hero moments gets a big budget re-up. The basic issue is of course inability to predict the future, inability of management to properly judge things, etc. Management is: Charitable version: full of people that necessarily cannot have full context/detail and must make quick high-level decisions Not Charitable version: full of sociopaths whose primary job is to maintain or improve standing, and secondary concern is making good long term decisions for a company, so cutting maintenance or spinning slapdash solutions and failures as epic wins is more effective.