> What strikes me is that it actually is easier to write new code than to properly maintain/refactor old, foreign code. Working with large amount of old code re

> What strikes me is that it actually is easier to write new code than to properly maintain/refactor old, foreign code. Working with large amount of old code requires a lot of hard, real planning and decisionmaking and learning to live with and adjust to decisions made by others in the past. Right on the money. Everyone loves greenfield because you get to build things up from scratch, try out your own ideas, and there's this feeling of tremendous velocity. You feel like you're just tearing through code, kicking butt, delivering wins. Then the difficult requests start to come in, which usually means feedback from real human users. That's when the rubber hits the road and the grumbling begins. And like you said, once the project is seen as maintenance it is 'not sexy' despite the fact that all successful software definitionally makes the most money while in the so-called maintenance stage.