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>> My last few jobs have been weighted towards maintenance. There is your problem. I had the exact same frustrations in my previous job. Now I am with a team d

by niyazpk 16y ago

>> My last few jobs have been weighted towards maintenance. There is your problem. I had the exact same frustrations in my previous job. Now I am with a team doing development projects and it feels a lot different now. Maintenance projects are good in a sense that you get to learn a lot by looking at other people code, but that in itself is not a good argument to stick with those type of projects. Every new development project, even if it is small, will have hard problems to solve. You will have to apply your knowledge of algorithms and data-structures more often than you imagined. In contrast, a maintenance project may give you a hard and difficult to debug problem which finally turns out to be caused by the previous developer forgetting to compare all the 7 properties of an object in the equals method. It is cute to have those problems once in a while, but there is not much chance of learning and innovation.

terra_t 16y ago
I did a stint as a maintenance programmer. I was proud of it, then. I'd worked on code written by McArthur geniuses and the worst PHP monkeys -- no matter how complex the code was, no matter what language it was written in, no matter which backend database, I took pride in being able to figure it out, re-architect it if necessary, and fix it. I didn't feel like I was going to seed; I was learning new (old) languages and systems all the time and I even got the chance to help on a few research projects, work with machine learning experts, etc. I found, however, that I just got $h1t on by management. I wasn't perceived as being productive, they were always complaining I was too slow and too expensive. And I was slow and expensive because maintenance programming is slow and expensive, particularly if you're the guy who'll clean up any mess, no matter how bad.
- CyberFonic 16y ago
  Sounds like you take pride in doing a great job. But unfortunately PHBs are too caught up in watching the P&L to even understand the value of you efforts. I did my share of clean-up jobs, but eventually no money would compensate for the pain endured.
dasil003 16y ago
Maintenance is an important and necessary job. However if you are a talented developer than you shouldn't accept a job that is only maintenance. Sure there are some exceptions like if you really believe in and want to help the organization, and if you're really appreciated it goes a long way. But generally if you are good at what you do then you shouldn't have to suffer this. There are simply too many opportunities out there to relegate yourself to a stagnant role. There are plenty of borderline incompetent programmers out there who will do a lot better debugging and maintaining an existing codebase than writing new systems from scratch. Any self-respecting programmer with a passion for their craft owes it to themselves to at least try to find a job where they are learning and progressing even if it's not perfect.

by niyazpk 16y ago

terra_t 16y ago

I did a stint as a maintenance programmer. I was proud of it, then. I'd worked on code written by McArthur geniuses and the worst PHP monkeys -- no matter how complex the code was, no matter what language it was written in, no matter which backend database, I took pride in being able to figure it out, re-architect it if necessary, and fix it. I didn't feel like I was going to seed; I was learning new (old) languages and systems all the time and I even got the chance to help on a few research projects, work with machine learning experts, etc. I found, however, that I just got $h1t on by management. I wasn't perceived as being productive, they were always complaining I was too slow and too expensive. And I was slow and expensive because maintenance programming is slow and expensive, particularly if you're the guy who'll clean up any mess, no matter how bad.

CyberFonic 16y ago
Sounds like you take pride in doing a great job. But unfortunately PHBs are too caught up in watching the P&L to even understand the value of you efforts. I did my share of clean-up jobs, but eventually no money would compensate for the pain endured.

dasil003 16y ago

Maintenance is an important and necessary job. However if you are a talented developer than you shouldn't accept a job that is only maintenance. Sure there are some exceptions like if you really believe in and want to help the organization, and if you're really appreciated it goes a long way. But generally if you are good at what you do then you shouldn't have to suffer this. There are simply too many opportunities out there to relegate yourself to a stagnant role. There are plenty of borderline incompetent programmers out there who will do a lot better debugging and maintaining an existing codebase than writing new systems from scratch. Any self-respecting programmer with a passion for their craft owes it to themselves to at least try to find a job where they are learning and progressing even if it's not perfect.