That's pretty much how it works everywhere. There's no career, or even pay, advancement for people who like to do this sort of work. You're called a "maintenan

That's pretty much how it works everywhere. There's no career, or even pay, advancement for people who like to do this sort of work. You're called a "maintenance programmer" which people take to mean you're not very good. On the contrary, a lot of those types of developers are very good. Better than the people who initially wrote the code and jumped ship when the bugs started rolling in that they couldn't fix. They understand the system and the business much better than the talky-talky system architecture wanna-bes. Whew, that turned into a rant quickly. I've just seen plenty of strong, smart developers get screwed because they don't do flashy work.