There is some of that for sure but fundamental things like software dependencies change so frequently in this industry such that any code you ship has a long an

There is some of that for sure but fundamental things like software dependencies change so frequently in this industry such that any code you ship has a long and unpredictable tail of maintenance work, so you end up spending a lot of your time doing things like ensuring your code doesn't call broken/deprecated APIs or migrating away from EOL'd database versions just to keep the lights on. I think we SWEs end up creating lots of work for each other.