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Comment by justicezyx | Hacker News Reader

I think there is a major flaw in the analogy.

Basically, maintenance of complex systems or assets, are intellectually demanding tasks. All your examples, however, are completely the opposite. I am not saying that the jobs do not require skills, it's just that these skills are not that valuable.

Also maintainer adds value in the positive way. Where all your example is to prevent value loss. The 2 are fundamentally different.

Contrary to common knowledge, maintainer is not needed to make the system running, if nothing changes. Maintainer is necessary to make the system running in changing environment. Real-world software or any valuable assets require change to keep up with the world surrounding it. A great mental bias is to implicitly think maintenance is about "keep it running", where at the same time conveniently omit the part about changing environment.

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>maintainer is not needed to make the system running, if nothing changes

Something tells me that you haven't maintained badly designed systems. Some actually do require manual attention from time to time, even if nothing changes. A single non-rotatable log file becomes too big and a restart has to be scheduled or an application starts behaving weirdly because a buggy and rarely used bit of code suddenly got used once and it destabilized the entire thing... I'm sure there's a lot of other ways in which applications can require maintenance even if it hasn't been updated for months.

> Basically, maintenance of complex systems or assets, are intellectually demanding tasks.

Not as hard as making those systems in the first place.

> I am not saying that the jobs do not require skills, it's just that these skills are not that valuable.

I'm not convinced that an average network engineer does a more challenging (or valuable) job than an average car mechanic.

It's often easier to build a system than it is to maintain it, because you have a free choice across the solution space and you don't have to maintain any existing commitments.

Maintenance (physical or virtual) can often be made extremely difficult or expensive because of the need to avoid disrupting working systems, and the need to integrate with what's already there.

You've never had to add a new small feature to a highly customized Wordpress site someone else built I think.

Fair enough!

>I'm not convinced that an average network engineer does a more challenging (or valuable) job than an average car mechanic.

Mechanical work on cars isn't rocket science, in the same way that IT work isn't. It's difficult if you don't know what you're doing, and not hard if you do.

Both things most anyone could do (at least at a basic level) themselves, but most people don't care to learn.

Come and work on our system. Poor database design and way too much complexity in simple tasks.Maintaining it is far harder than a rewrite would be.

> Poor database design and way too much complexity in simple tasks.

This actually supports my point that making a decent system in the first place is hard. And if you have a reasonable estimate that a rewrite would be cheaper than incurred maintenance costs, it might be worth it.

I was speaking generally though: an average quality system and average maintenance work. Some systems are terrible and fall apart from an angry glance, some are so good they require almost no maintenance. In my personal experience systems maintenance can be menial and time consuming, sometimes clever, but it ain't no rocket science.

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