Comments
By Willingham 2025-06-2012:05 Maintenance never seems to be respected, but without it none of us could do what we do. It applies to garbage men, and even tech.
I worked tech support for nearly 20 years on various things, big networking equipment, mainframe equipment. Some companies paid really well and made their money / stayed afloat through hard times because they had a reputation for providing high quality tech support. But in the end every company seems to devalue it eventually. Quality of management starts to dip, resources are slowly siphoned away, some management mistakes that because problems get reported through support channels that is somehow always support's fault. Things start to turn and it goes bad, someone decides it looks good on a resume to outsource and so on.
Before I left my last support job the local manager decided to cancel the quarterly pizza party (maybe couple hundred bucks in pizza) to save money ... I was taking a buy out (I was fortunate) and as a fun way to go out I held my own pizza party, spent my own money ;) Company pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars and I held the pizza party.
I moved on and now I write code where you get paid more / valued more / more respect making new things. It's hard to avoid the fact that maintenance is just not respected.
Like a pizza party, the benefits of maintenance can be hard to quantify, but the costs are easy to quantify.
How do you quantify incidences that didn’t happen because of proper maintenance? Did you maintain more than necessary to achieve no incidents?
Middle managers are a reflection of leadership.
By mey 2025-06-2015:09 I have learned over my career that I can't dictate culture. If I attempt to, I will go insane from the stress, because it always comes top down. I try, I give feedback, I do what I can, but these choices are systemic. You can shelter yourself, peers, and team from some rain, but not the ocean.
I love maintenance. I love keeping things running smoothly.
I sure wish people that sign paychecks valued it as much as I do.
By Nasrudith 2025-06-216:26 I suspect it is that they aren't getting proper numeric feedback from the difficulties of calculability of statistical durability with varied maintenance regimens ahead of time so they cannot quantify the risks properly. They might defer maintenance now because they see no harm in it. But if they knew that deferring maintenance would take say five years off of the life of their expensive capex and the cost of insuring for such a catastrophe would eat a large share of their profits they would freak out about such dereliction of duty.
By imnotlost 2025-06-2013:58 They know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
By auto 2025-06-2013:52 > Frustrated by the constant intrusions of child care and housework — “the back half of life,” as she called it — on her creative ambitions, she resolved to simply turn the work into her creative product. “Clean your desk, wash the dishes, clean the floor, wash your clothes, wash your toes, change the baby’s diaper, finish the report, correct the typos, mend the fence,” she wrote in the treatise, which was published by Artforum in 1971. “Clear the table, call him again, flush the toilet, stay young.”
There's more here than just the sanitation narrative, she's tapping into the focus Zen puts on the present, that these every day chores ARE the meditation, or in this case, the artistic expression.
