[siilikuin]

Reminds me of one of my favorite papers ever: "Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems that Never Happened". https://web.mit.edu/nelsonr/www/Repenning%3DSterman_CMR_su01...

Unfortunately, for my money, I think the only real way you can create an incentive structure which emphasizes stability and change is by offering some kind of form of insurance.

My father was an electrician who often complained about how he never got paid adequately for the stellar, stable work he did, and one day I asked him whether he ever thought of raising his rates but providing a kind of service guarantee, where if a problem occurred that could be traced back to his own work, he would step in and perform the additional work at a reduced fee. Naturally he laughed out loud, because that's not how business works.

Ownership of an already-mature product is sort of like providing an insurance policy by default, of course. And sticking with conventional designs can be a solid business strategy if you use their slow-changing nature to e.g. build the thing faster than you could otherwise. That's the strategy I'm using for my consulting: Stick with what we know best (Hugo+Bootstrap for a napkin sketch UI demo as fast as possible, then SQLite+Django+React to build out the main functionality ASAP too). Emphasize solving the _business_ problem over the shiny tech.

[mablopoule]

I don't know if there is a name for it, but this is a plague for every security-related thing, or any jobs where the more skilled you are, the more people forget you (like a sound engineer for a movie production).

An ex-director of a French national security agency complained about exactly that during an interview, that you get more budget after a terrorist attack, or after you stop one that was well under way, but never if you avoided the condition to create a terrorist cell altogether, or nipped it in the bud.