So much of today’s society revolves around creating new things rather than maintaining existing things. Yet, the two go hand in hand - innovation without the ability to scale and maintain is frivolous, and maintenance without innovation is stagnation.
There is importance in indigenous knowledge and traditional knowledge, which strides this fine line very well.
MVP vs Product
Source: I could do that in a weekend! by Dan Luu
It’s not just building out an initial system, but also about how maintainable and scalable the system is for the foreseeable future.
Businesses that actually care about turning a profit will spend a lot of time (hence, a lot of engineers) working on optimizing systems, even if an MVP for the system could have been built in a weekend.
This reminds me of a common fallacy we see in unreliable systems, where people build the happy path with the idea that the happy path is the “real” work, and that error handling can be tacked on later. For reliable systems, error handling is more work than the happy path. The same thing is true for large services — all of this stuff that people don’t think of as “real” work is more work than the core service
On shifting the focus too quickly
”One important topic of conversation is the danger of moving too triumphantly from innovation to maintenance. There is no point in keeping the practice of hero-worship that merely changes the cast of heroes without confronting some of the deeper problems underlying the innovation obsession.”