All of the things you hate drive me crazy too. I sometimes want to bang my head against the wall when I see copy-and-paste code written by someone who didn't kn

All of the things you hate drive me crazy too. I sometimes want to bang my head against the wall when I see copy-and-paste code written by someone who didn't know how to program. But I enjoy the challenge of fixing the problems, one by one, refactoring incrementally. I've also learned that what I think is the right way to solve a problem isn't the only way. Most often I am rewriting bits of crap code, but I also learn new techniques and approaches. I love green fields programmers who know the best way to do everything. Their projects frequently flame out, leaving a desperate client and an almost-working code base that fell short of someone's idea of perfection, but is fairly close to working after some practical compromises are made. The best thing about maintenance programming is working on real code with real users. I don't miss spending three-fourths of the project schedule arguing data structures with three other programmers and a nervous client.