[Themaintainers] Why Do People Neglect Maintenance?

[Sims, Benjamin Hayden]

I work with a lot of scientific computing folks, and while it's true Fortran is an old language, from what I can see it is very much alive in the scientific computing world, and has been updated and maintained over time. There are a lot of fluent Fortran programmers in the scientific computing community, so the language itself is not typically the issue, it's more that it was possible to write very convoluted code in Fortran and documentation was not a big concern in the early days, so it's often hard to understand old code or modify it without breaking it in unexpected ways. Maybe that points to the importance of documentation and continuity of knowledge in long-term maintenance (or lack thereof).

________________________________
From: themaintainers-bounces at lists.stevens.edu <themaintainers-bounces at lists.stevens.edu> on behalf of Ishi Crew <mediaentropy at gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 7, 2019 4:12:00 AM
To: Julien Kirch
Cc: themaintainers at lists.stevens.edu
Subject: Re: [Themaintainers] Why Do People Neglect Maintenance?

Regarding Julie K's comment --- I've talked to people who do scientific computing (ie use computers to solve scientific problems) and they tell me that while the most current software is all things like R , Python, or C (which is old) , they also have alot of their old standard software written in Fortran which was written in 1970's-1980's.  And if something happens with that --- a problem-- they basically don't really know how to fix it.

  It seems like an issue of being able to use new technology for fixing plumbing in a house, but the often very old, underground  water system that serves your house is basically inaccesible---you'd have to dig up the street with a bulldozer, cut all the trees down,  and deal with huge pipes which are decades old.

On Wed, Aug 7, 2019 at 5:24 AM Julien Kirch <archiloque at archiloque.net<mailto:archiloque at archiloque.net>> wrote:
Hi,

I'm working in IT where maintenance is a big topic, for example in banks and other large organisations the core systems may be decade-old and sometimes use technologies that are becoming obscure.

In IT people are more easily promoted for creating new systems, and newer technologies are often seen as more performant and easier to use so maintenance is not seen as cool or as a good career choice.

And as maintenance is often not seen as important or difficult by management, at any moment your job can be moved to a subcontractor -- for example an offshore one -- when budget cuts are required. The secure path is to jump from a project as soon as it reach maintenance to go to another project that is just starting.

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.

Julien

Le 7 août 2019 à 10:13, Ishi Crew <mediaentropy at gmail.com<mailto:mediaentropy at gmail.com>> a écrit :

I think of farming and food production (my grandparents were small or family farmers though they actually had or used huge tracts of land because few people lived in that area--north dakota) and i knew people who lived partly by hunting , gathering and gardening in WV.  At one time a large fraction of US population was involved in farming--like 50%. Now they say its just 3% (though there is a much larger population).  However you have a huge supply chain for food---trucking, road maintenance for all these trucks, energy industry for transport, processing food (sometimes into junk or conveniance food, bottled water, coca cola, plastic, huge stores with cleaning , stocking , clerks and security personnel and more) .

So the 3% figure which makes things seem simpler, like GIS, involves another kind of complexity. I used to have order paper topographic maps for my hiking trips---now i can get them on my smart phone in like 5 minutes (if i can remember the websites)--very simple.   But making a smart phone and websites is complex.  And even having a smartphone makes my life more complex---have to learn how to use it, and not lose or break it, or have it stolen.

On Wed, Aug 7, 2019 at 2:45 AM Hanlie Pretorius <hanlie.pretorius at gmail.com<mailto:hanlie.pretorius at gmail.com>> wrote:
I found this article very thought provoking - thank you for compiling
it. I wrote down some of my thoughts here, perhaps not much new for
people on this list.

Often people assert that the 1980s marked a turning point in the
economy with regard to spending priorities, implying that before then
maintenance was more of a priority. Does this mean that economic
reasons are the major ones for lack of maintenance? I suspect so.

Was anything else different in the past or was maintenance a problem
throughout human history?

What about the boredom factor? I sometimes find it difficult to
motivate myself to brush my teeth because it's such a repetitive and
boring activity.

I believe people start appreciating maintenance when they have to do
it themselves or if they have to pay directly to have it done
(provided it's done properly). Perhaps payment for maintenance should
not be part of general taxes, it should be a specific levy that can be
traced back to actual maintenance performed.

The more complex our society gets, the more extensive and intensive
the maintenance requirements get. Under the guise of  simplifying our
lives, technology has pushed maintenance to the back stage where other
people have to think for us. In my industry (Geographic Information
Systems), the move away from desktop software to the web has
simplified (the quality of the simplification is debatable) GIS for
users not trained in GIS. But behind the scenes, my work has become
far more complex.

Perhaps we humans just can't help ourselves when it comes to
maintenance, just like we can't help repeating the cycles of
civilisation rise, complication and collapse.

I live in South Africa where the visible evidence of no maintenance or
incompetent maintenance is just downright scary.

Regards
Hanlie


> Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2019 10:09:55 -0400
> From: lee vinsel <lee at themaintainers.org<mailto:lee at themaintainers.org>>
> To: Themaintainers at lists.stevens.edu<mailto:Themaintainers at lists.stevens.edu>
> Subject: [Themaintainers] Why Do People Neglect Maintenance?
> Message-ID:
>       <CAFfY7rEZbMyYg1jr2dWYtubzU5-j1JniB1PAZj+MP2==GmfSwA at mail.gmail.com<mailto:GmfSwA at mail.gmail.com>>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Hey, everybody.
>
> The three Maintainers co-directors - Andy Russell, Jess Meyerson, and
> I - pulled
> together a blog post laying out the factors/explanations we often hear
> about why maintenance is neglected.
> <http://themaintainers.org/blog/2019/7/30/why-do-people-neglect-maintenance>
> As is often the case these days, this post attempts to echo back what we've
> been hearing from others - including all the folks on this list!
>
> And as always, we are especially keen to hear feedback from you all. We're
> hoping this post kickstarts discussion about how to think and theorize
> about and empirically study these issues. Please give us feedback in anyway
> you see fit - in the blog comments, on Twitter, via private/direct
> messages, such as email, and ESPECIALLY on this list!!! :-)
>
> Hope everyone is doing well.
>
> Lee
>
> --
> Co-Director
> The Maintainers
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