Decoding the innovation delusion, nurturing the maintenance mindset

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).

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.

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.

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.