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>Maintaining systems often takes more skill and understanding than building new ones. This is true in practice, but in my opinion it's self-fulfilling - mainta

>Maintaining systems often takes more skill and understanding than building new ones. This is true in practice, but in my opinion it's self-fulfilling - maintaining systems often takes more skill because they were built (or modified) by people with less skill. When skilled people build a new system, it takes less skilled people to maintain it. Of course, the longer the less-skilled people maintain it, the higher the skill floor creeps for maintaining it.

PaulHoule 4y ago
This creates psychological and political problems. It's not at all unusual to hire a fresher to start a project and then have an experienced person do the final work to put it into production. Maybe 1/3 of the time this works really well and you can deploy the system faster than management can approve the deployment. The rest of the time (which consumes more of your time because these projects drag on and on) the fresher got the project to the point where it seemed 80% done to management but the work that is really left to be done is intricate and immense. Often management thinks the programmer who started the project was really productive and that the finisher is "slow"; they think it would be great if they could get more people like the starter but the reality is that with people like that they wouldn't deliver consistently and the quality of what they'd deliver would be terrible. It's one thing to feel unappreciated but it's particularly destructive when the finisher internalizes this attitude that they really are unproductive.