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Comment by spockz | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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Yeah, agreed. Maintenance, reliability and tech debt should be first class concerns. Product strategy should include them, allocate time for them and give clear guidance of the trade offs that drive prioritization of these lines of work vs prototyping, feature delivery, etc.

Neglecting maintenance is a very bad idea, but setting it up as an enshrined cultural north star of an engineering department is actually even worse.

Maintenance should be just that, maintenance - something you attend to regularly to prevent future problems. The problem our industry has is that every approach to software has become a religious like cargo cult activity. In my opinion the cause of that is the consultancy-executive symbiotic nexus, consultants promise exciting silver bullets and executives buy in because they can always blame the consultants if it goes wrong.

If you get too good and maintenance, you will be that senior guy keeping thing running while junior will get to build those nice and shiny things, keeping up with latest tech and work on their job transferrable skills.

It's always a dilemma: do I get good at maintenance and never be promoted to a sexy new project, because I am too good at maintaining that system, or immediately start working at new things so that I never become the maintenance guy.

I think that is the dilemma which stands behind the aversion to maintenance at companies.

This is a bit of a chicken and egg. Why should it be that seniors are the only ones keeping stuff rolling and the juniors are adding extra features? I’ve also seen the reverse happen. Senior engineers only wanting to do new stuff and juniors being tasked to do all the “boring” maintenance part.

The problem is that when you consider maintenance to be the keeping running of every individual component as it is currently doing then it will be boring. If you consider maintenance the art of keeping the whole foundation geared towards being able to run smoothly and accommodating new features, now that is a challenge. :-)

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