We overvalue innovation and entrepreneurship: Shifting the focus to Maintenance over Fads
November 4, 2016 at 7:28 am 6 comments
Until I heard this recent Freakonomics podcast, I was not aware of this response to innovation and entrepreneurship trends. The quote below speaks directly to engineering education, but is as much about computing education.
The value of engineering is much, much more than just innovation and new things. Focusing on taking care of the world rather than just creating the new nifty thing that’s going to solve all of our problems. If you look at what engineers do, out in the world, like 70-80 percent of them spend most of their time just keeping things going. And so, this comes down to engineering education too, when we’re forcing entrepreneurship and innovation as the message, is that we’re just kind of skewing reality for young people and we’re not giving them a real picture and we’re also not valuing the work that they’re probably going to do in their life. That just seems to me to be kind of a bad idea.
Source: In Praise of Maintenance – Freakonomics Freakonomics
The quote is from Lee Vinsel who was a co-author on a thought-provoking essay, Hail the maintainers, sub-titled: “Capitalism excels at innovation but is failing at maintenance, and for most lives it is maintenance that matters more.”
To take the place of progress, ‘innovation’, a smaller, and morally neutral, concept arose. Innovation provided a way to celebrate the accomplishments of a high-tech age without expecting too much from them in the way of moral and social improvement.
It’s easy to see this emphasis on innovation over maintenance. We talk about disruption and transformation much more than reforming, repairing, or improving. We talk more about creation than understanding.
We increasingly teach computer science to prepare students to be innovators and create new things (e.g., join startups), when the reality is that most computer science graduates are going to spend the majority of their time maintaining existing systems. (See the papers by Beth Simon and Andy Begel tracking new hires at Microsoft.) Few who do enter the startup world will create successful software and successful companies, so it’s unlikely that those students who aim to create startups will have a lifelong career in startups. In terms of impact and importance, keeping large, legacy systems running is a much greater social contribution than creating yet another app or game, when so few of those startup efforts are successful. Aren’t we then as guilty as the engineering educators, described in the first quote?
In terms of what we teach in computing and how, innovation and maintenance is a hard balance to strike. As Alan Kay has noted, “The computing revolution hasn’t happened yet.” We’re still inventing and innovating because what we have isn’t good enough. But, that desire to value what’s new leads us to overvaluing the fad of the moment, rather than exploring, developing, and understanding what we have at-hand. Why do we have to keep changing the introductory programming language, when it’s clear that we don’t understand how students learn (and don’t learn) the programming languages that we currently teach? Why did we give up on Logo when it’s still better than most languages for children today? It’s a tough balance — to strive for better than we have, but valuing, developing, and improving what we currently have.
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: capitalism, computing education, Logo, pascal, teachers.
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Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take 
1.
Andy "SuperFly" Rundquist | November 4, 2016 at 8:55 am
This really has me thinking. All the lines about teaching innovation, disruption, etc come out of my mouth (as a physics professor) all the time. I’m also working with a group of students developing web apps, though, and while we’re trying to solve some problems on campus (simple apps to make student/faculty/staff lives easier), I hope the students also learn about how to work collectively on a big code project and how to come into a project that’s already a ways down the road but still contribute. I wonder how I could think about my physics classes in a similar way.
My #NaBloCoMo question for you: Is this a partial defense for physics curriculum to be teaching centuries-old concepts instead of focusing on the newest ideas? The joke in physics education circles is that the ubiquitous course “Modern Physics” isn’t modern at all. But it seems we teach it because students need that foundation. What this post has me thinking is that students need to be “exploring, developing, and understanding what we have at-hand.” That feels half(or less)-baked right now but I thought I’d throw it out. Thanks for the great post!
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thinkingwiththings | November 4, 2016 at 12:15 pm
Mark, you have said most articulately what I’ve been thinking for quite a while now. Although I’m a social scientist, I work a lot across the disciplines with CS and Engineering faculty (and students) in particular. We have a good new entrepreneurship program, run by people who understand that it’s not always the flashy new widget that is best (a recent team that won the top prize was focused on hunger on campus and a system to address this). Still, we have a “cult of innovation” in our culture at the moment, and it continues to contribute to massive wastefulness. (CS folks MUST also attend to the problems of electronic waste, which is highly toxic. See http://svtc.org/)
I do see much to be hopeful about, though. I teach a lot of millennials (and am mother to two more) and I notice a trend in the maker world toward repair (for example, repair cafes) and mending (particularly of garments). I see a new ethos emerging and hope we can encourage that. You point me toward some really good resources on this–thanks.
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Bonnie | November 4, 2016 at 12:52 pm
One of the most important factors in being able to successfully maintain software is whether that software was well designed, using good software engineering practices, to start with. That is why I believe it is very important to teach students good design practice and good testing practices, as they learn to program. I think the current rush to teach students to “code” (a term I find more and more abhorrent as time goes on) leads to a lack of emphasis on sound design. Software developers shouldn’t be “coding”, they should be designing, refactoring, and testing.
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Bob Kahn | November 8, 2016 at 8:19 am
Mark,
I have been following your blog since July when I came across a post about Logo. I am teaching a new middle school CS class using MicroWorlds and it it going well, even though I have no formal background in CS.
I find this post particularly compelling. If we push innovation, it seems to me that we set many students up for failure because not all will be able to innovate. If we add repair or maintenance or improvement, we provide many more opportunities for students to explore, learn and be successful. It also gives them something to start from. and may lead to innovation more naturally. Reading your post, reminds me of how many teachers/educators attempt to motivate students by telling them “you will need this in the future” or some variation thereof, or “many of the jobs that people your generation are going to have haven’t been invented yet.” What are students supposed to do with these types of statements? They ignore the present, the now, and have been shown to demotivate students. It seems to me that to always talk about innovation sort of does the same thing. We have a motto at our school “shape a future with meaning.” I think “shape a NOW with meaning,” is more beneficial and would result in a future with meaning if enough meaningful “nows” happen.
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