4 ms·

It's not only that it's more fun, it's also usually the better path for self-promotion. Inside a company promotions often go towards those who have most visibly

by WJW 2y ago

It's not only that it's more fun, it's also usually the better path for self-promotion. Inside a company promotions often go towards those who have most visibly contributed to new projects. In open source projects that is of course not as prevalent, but even then many people will put open source contributions on their resume and "made big feature XYZ" is typically more impressive to recruiters than "fixed lots of small documentation and localisation problems". I don't think this is justified, as (since the article correctly describes) over time maintenance becomes much more important than the initial feature creation. But at the moment this is the world we live in and people adjust their behavior accordingly.

derf_ 2y ago
Management often gets rewarded for new "launches", and rarely for things that already worked continuing to work. To some degree, so does the business (although a track record of things continuing to work over a long period has value, if anyone has a time horizon beyond the next quarterly report). Meanwhile, it is more difficult to measure productivity for maintenance work, because the primary work product is understanding. Managers with the skill and experience to recognize and compensate for this are rare. Developers are not blind to these incentives.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  > To some degree, so does the business Sorry, but that part is wrong. The business gets rewarded for doing the same thing that was already working again and again and again. Nobody goes out of their way to buy innovative things. It's even worse, customers tend to avoid new things until they had enough time to show themselves as "not new anymore" or "more of the same". There are incredibly few exceptions, and most of them are created artificially at the cost of a large publicity budget.

4 ms·

It's not only that it's more fun, it's also usually the better path for self-promotion. Inside a company promotions often go towards those who have most visibly

by WJW 2y ago

derf_ 2y ago
Management often gets rewarded for new "launches", and rarely for things that already worked continuing to work. To some degree, so does the business (although a track record of things continuing to work over a long period has value, if anyone has a time horizon beyond the next quarterly report). Meanwhile, it is more difficult to measure productivity for maintenance work, because the primary work product is understanding. Managers with the skill and experience to recognize and compensate for this are rare. Developers are not blind to these incentives.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  > To some degree, so does the business Sorry, but that part is wrong. The business gets rewarded for doing the same thing that was already working again and again and again. Nobody goes out of their way to buy innovative things. It's even worse, customers tend to avoid new things until they had enough time to show themselves as "not new anymore" or "more of the same". There are incredibly few exceptions, and most of them are created artificially at the cost of a large publicity budget.