Why Do People Neglect Maintenance?
Early in my career, I got stuck doing a lot of software maintenance on legacy systems (I suspect this permanently stunted my professional growth, but this was during the great recession and I took whatever work I could find).  It&#x27;s a hard rut to get out of - I spent a lot of time developing relevant skills in my spare time.<p>Anyway, one place I worked had a 10 page procedure for building the system.  It involved running several scripts, logged into 2 or 3 different servers (we were running Solaris 8 - which was already quite old by then) as different users.  About half the procedure was written down, the rest was unspoken and passed down via oral tradition.<p>A particularly intelligent and motivated guy once took it upon himself to unravel the whole mess and come up with a sane build solution.  Unfortunately, his quest was not approved by management, the time taken away from bug fixing caused him to fall behind on &quot;points&quot; (i.e., number of tickets closed in the bug tracker), and he was laid off.  So we stuck to the old system that sort of worked, most of the time.<p>Now, one of the user accounts that was required to build a certain module belonged to a person that no longer worked at the company (let&#x27;s call him Steve - I don&#x27;t remember his real name).  We were certain there was a permissions or environment issue somewhere, but were unable to track down the specific reason why only Steve&#x27;s user account could successfully build said module.  We were successfully ignoring this obviously absurd situation until we got a new sysadmin....<p>The new sysadmin was unfortunately a very motivated guy who wanted to set things in order.  He reviewed all of the user accounts, noticed &quot;Steve&quot; no longer worked for the company, and deleted his account.  We were unable to build until the backup containing Steve&#x27;s account was restored.<p>We never fixed the FUBARed build procedure, mostly because our customer (this was a defense contract, so the govt was the customer) didn&#x27;t want to pay for such an effort - every thing we did had to be tied back to a specific req number in our system requirements specification (SRS).  Fixing technical debt was not covered in the SRS, so it never got fixed.<p>Eventually I was caught up in a mass layoff and went on to better things :)