Maintenance: a response

Posted by Johnny at 9:52 a.m.

This post is in response to Kevin's latest post. Think of it as a supercomment.

40

Eight to five times five.
Waste away, waste today.
Awake, I dream
Of sleep.

A new day,
The same day.
Same people,
Same state.

Power to change,
or procrastinate.
Power of faith,
and doubt.

How long will
a known question
have no answer?
Tomorrow, always.

Taken without permission from flunkeddivine.blogspot.com.
© 2007 flunkeddivine.

Amongst some other pithy stuff, this poem, to me, has summed up the disillusionment of working in IT for an extended period of time. Upon graduation, some computer folks think that working in IT will be fun because they can do what they do best, which is geeking it up all the live long day. But what they don't realize is that they're going to spend at least 7 hours of their work day doing what I consider to be the least satisfying part of life: performing maintenance. I don't know how you feel about maintenance, but I deplore it.

Some acts of maintenance are vital and necessary for life, such as eating and exercising, and others are vital and necessary for (eventual) reproduction, such as showering and brushing teeth, but acts like shovelling the driveway intrinsically carry less incentive. Have we not solved these problems yet? Are there not automated systems for performing these household duties?

The two most profitable industries, in my mind, are health care and maintenance. (One might argue that this is redundant because what is health care, if not bodily maintenance?) IT, a subindustry of maintenance, is also highly profitable because Kevin's and my future industry, software engineering, will move further and further away from perfection and increase the need for maintenance, thus creating more IT jobs. This is inevitable. As the size and complexity of software increases, the less perfect it can be.

This idea can be further abstracted and applied to life in general, and I'm most likely rehashing the ideas of many 20th century philosophers. As we strive, in middle class western society, to reduce maintenance so that we might enjoy an extra modicum of our lives, we will inevitably invent technology to help us achieve the unachievable, and it will require maintenance. Instead of removing maintenance, we are merely shifting it.

Let's take, for example, my gripe with snow removal. My driveway is very long and very narrow, which makes shovelling snow an altogether frustrating experience. I would easily pay $1000 for a robot to sit outside of my house and shovel the driveway at the first sign of snow. I'm sure that in a few years, this technology will exist and it will be affordable, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it will be worth it.

Robots, as with driveways, need maintenance. They have some kind of power source that needs replenishment, they have moving metallic parts that need lubrication, and, worst of all, they have software that needs patching. I can easily see a design flaw causing my driveway robot to start shovelling my lawn or the street or a neighbour's driveway. A patch to prevent this flaw might involve RF transmitters placed at the boundaries of the shovelling area so that the robot stays confined to the driveway.

The next flaw could be a physical component of the robot that prevents it from adapting to the lumpiness of a 30-year-old driveway, which would entail sending the robot into the factory for upgrades. And what happens if the robot tips over, or is unable to clean the snow from its snow and boundary sensors? Is it even worth it?

Some of you, the traditionalists, are probably shouting "NO!" into your monitors. "Just pick up a damn shovel!" I professed to deploring maintenance at the beginning of the article, and so if using a shovel amounted to less time spent on maintenance than using a driveway shovelling robot, I would opt for the shovel.

On the other hand, the only reason I am employable is because western society is obsessed with maintenance reduction, and projects like the Driveway Bot 2000 cause the anti-maintenites among us to salivate with lazy fervour. Robots need software and I just happen to be a software engineer. How convenient! Better start writing the course materials for Robot Maintenance 101...