[Themaintainers] Why Do People Neglect Maintenance?

[David Eddy]

Julien / all -

On Aug 07, 2019, at 5:24 AM, Julien Kirch <archiloque at archiloque.net> wrote:


For anyone who believes the marketing bs about these still operational systems “moving to the Cloud” I’ve got some Florida beach-front property to sell you.  Priced to move.  

The cracks in the “going to the Cloud” fantasy are just beginning to quietly surface.  

The Cloud is effectively yet another layer of poorly documented complexity, built on top of existing decades old “legacy” systems.  Reality is if an organization has a difficult-to-maintain collection of applications, moving to the Cloud means you will have TWO difficult-to-maintain messes.



> Finally, in my experience, maintenance in IT is often a more complex / difficult work than creating new systems: you have to deal with existing constraints, documentation is often lacking with important knowledge lost, and breaking the system has real consequences.
> 
> So in many places things are pretty dire, and I don't think they will improve soon.

I’ve been in IT since 1970, when (for the next decade large clerical organizations  —  insurance companies, banks, mutual funds, etc.) back office paper flows were being furiously automated.

Even as a clueless (history major, facile with details & obscure footnotes) newbie I did notice a core value of IT culture… “Smart people write new systems… dumb people maintain old systems.”  The maneuvering to get onto a “new” project was intense.  Today this manifests itself in $15,000 coding camps.  As a coder one has at best a 15 year career until you’re deemed too expensive & your once hot tech knowledge is seen as out-of-fashion.  In my day, all I needed to get another job was how to spell COBOL, IBM, JCL & CICS.

It took several decades to grok that, as you say, maintaining existing collections of systems  —  a small Fortune 350 firm will have perhaps 800+ mainframe applications accumulated, cobbled together over the decades as the organization bobs & weaves to survive in the marketplace  —  is significantly more challenging than starting with a blank sheet of paper.

Unfortunately the cultural / organizational rewards & psyche still favor “new.”  Even when the “new” is just another layer hammered onto the side of existing systems.

In 1986 I passed through a firm that in its hiring pitch went out of its way to describe itself as a “development” (e.g. “new”) shop.  This was purely semantic hair splitting / hand waving.  Something that took only two weeks was defined as “maintenance” (bad) vs more than two weeks was “development” (good).  NOTHING could be accomplished in two weeks.

On the realistic side they did (quietly) understand that it took a good journeyman programmer with 5 years experience about 18 months to come up to speed on the “nuances” of how the systems & culture worked.


I have two bottom lines:

1/ - Harvard Business School (HBS) does not teach “systems” [1] as a required first year course, woven throughout all the other courses.  (Old Army saying: “If the Army, in its infinite wisdom, thought you should have a wife, they’d issue you one.”)  I leave it to the motivated student to translate that Army wisdom to the HBS experience.

2/ - It ultimately takes dead bodies [2]  —  both literally & euphemistically for events like Equifax in 2017, CapitalONE currently & a $10M fine to Morgan Stanley (WSJ, 2018-12-16 "Finra Slaps Morgan Stanley With $10 Million Fine Over Anti-Money-Laundering Program”) to ever-so-slowly BEGIN [3] to garner attention.


_____________________________________________________________
[1] - “Systems” is NOT just learning to write code.  Required reading for non-computer folks is Fred Brooks’ classic: “The Mythical Man-Month,” the story of creating IBM's mainframe operating system in the early 1960s  —  now 55 years old & rebranded to z/OS  —  where he points out writing code was 1/6th  —  17%  —  of the effort.

[2] - We’ve had a local tragedy.  Seven motorcyclists (veterans, JarHeads) died when a truck driver with suspended license (on drugs, naturally) slammed into them.  The RMV (Registry of Motor Vehicles) had been filing violation citations in a warehouse.  More directly the RMV had a buyout a few years back where the oldest, most knowledgeable people  —  who I have to assume knew the systems  —  took the retirement package & ran.

[3] - This point emphasized at my initial Congressional Y2K hearing where the US House subcommittee chairman offered that with difficult issues one needs to have pitched the issue 1,000+ times to anyone & everyone you can button hole.  At which point someone you regard as intelligent & have explained the issue multiple times will come to you & have their “understanding" totally bass-ackwards.  This is the the signal you’re BEGINNING to make progress.

__________________
David Eddy
deddy at davideddy.com


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.stevens.edu/pipermail/themaintainers/attachments/20190807/a78f80f6/attachment.html>