"Maintenance is never as rewarded as new features,"

And security work is rewarded even less!

> And security work is rewarded even less

While I do recognize that this is a pervasive problem, it seems counter-intuitive to me based on the tendency of the human brain to be risk averse.

It raises an interesting question of "why doesn't the risk of security breaches trigger the emotions associated with risk in those making the decision of how much to invest in security?".

Downstream of that is likely "Can we communicate the security risk story in a way that more appropriately triggers the associated risk emotions?"

What is the consequence for security breaches? Usually some negative press everyone forgets in a week. Maybe a lost sale or two, but that's hard to measure. If you're exceedingly unlucky, an inconsequential fine. At worst paying for two years of credit monitoring for your users.

What's the risk? The stock price will be back up by next week.

The people making the decision don't have a direct negative impact. Someone's head might role, but that's usually far up the chain where the comp and connections are high enough to not care. The POs making the day to day decisions are under more pressure for new features than they are for security.

easier to consider people to tend towards conservative rather than risk averse. if we were truly risk averse, society would be very different.

the easy explanation is that the cost of a breach is externalized, so decision makers gain benefit from savings in not investing in security.

Look at the crowdstrike failure as a recent example, but there's plenty more in the past.

Speaking of digging deeper, can you expand on that theory on why focus/man hours spent on maintenance leads to commoditization and why a company wants to avoid that?

Top of my head, new things have unbounded potential, existing ones have known potential. We assume the new will be better.

I think it's part of the reason stocks almost always dip after positive earnings reports. No matter how positive it's always less than idealised.

You might think there's a trick where you can sell maintenance as a new thing but you've just invented the unnecessary rewrite.

To answer your question more directly, once something has been achieved it's safe to assume someone else can achieve it also, so the focus turns to the new thing. Why else would we develop hydrogen or neutron bombs when we already had perfectly good fission ones (they got commoditised).

Given enough iteration with the same incentives, two engineering teams might end up with the same sort of product overall. We see this with airframes. We established the prototypical airframe for the commercial airliner in the 1950s and haven't changed it in 70 years since. This is good for the airline but bad for the aircraft manufacturer. The airline can now choose between boeing or airbus or anyone else for their product. If boeing had some novel plane design that wasn't copied the world over, then the airline company would be beholden to them alone.

Sounds like automobiles are -- have been, until now -- an even more long-lasting example. The basic recipe has been the same for over a century: Four wheels, two to five doors, steering wheel and other controls at one of the front seats, internal combustion engine.

Only now is one of those components, the engine, being changed out. And looking at that from this perspective, it's apparently not as humongous a change as many are now claiming: For one thing, it's just one of the four (or more?) parts of the basic recipe; for another, it's not all that new -- electric motors are in wide use elsewhere, and were one of the alternatives in rather wide use in cars, too, before the industry settled on the current recipe ~a hundred years ago.

Anyway, the "beholden to them alone" bit doesn't seem to apply to the automotive industry, since pretty much all manufacturers are in on the switch-to-electrics idea. Which begs the question: Would there really be so much of a customer lock-in in the aeronautic space either? Just like the idea of driving cars by electric motors is unpatentable, what could Boeing (or anyone else) come up with in the basic design of an aeroplane that isn't too general an idea to be protectable, or (most probably) hasn't been tried before?