Science & Tech Quote by Wietse Venema

Venema’s line lands like a cool corrective to the industry’s favorite mythology: that software is primarily about invention. By flatly stating that “most of the effort” goes to maintaining “code that already exists,” he punctures the startup-era romance of greenfield brilliance and replaces it with an older, truer picture of engineering as stewardship. The sentence is almost aggressively unglamorous. That’s the point.

The subtext is resource politics. “Maintenance” isn’t just bug-fixing; it’s dependency updates, security patches, performance regressions, compatibility promises, compliance, migrations, and the never-ending work of keeping systems intelligible to new humans. Venema, known for security work where “already exists” often means “already vulnerable,” is also hinting at a moral dimension: neglecting maintenance isn’t neutral, it’s an invitation to failure. The phrase quietly implies accumulated risk, because code ages the way infrastructure does: invisibly, until it doesn’t.

Rhetorically, the quote works because it refuses to argue. No blame, no drama, no manifesto. Just an empirical-sounding observation that feels like it came from hard-won experience. That scientist’s posture matters: it frames software not as art or hype but as a living system with entropy. In an industry that rewards shipping the new and celebrates “move fast,” Venema’s intent is to re-center dignity around the unsexy labor that actually keeps the world running. The cultural jab is clear: if maintenance is where the effort goes, then our prestige economy is mispriced.