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 ho

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.