Maintaining someone else's code is MUCH HARDER than writing something new. Any business older than 2 years needs someone to maintain their existing codebase, r

Maintaining someone else's code is MUCH HARDER than writing something new. Any business older than 2 years needs someone to maintain their existing codebase, rather than rewriting it from scratch for each new employee. Maintenance is seen as lower status, even though it's usually much harder than new development. For my current job, I'm doing mostly maintenance, even though I thought it was a combination of maintenance and new development when I took it. When I go on interviews, when I say "I'm doing 100% maintenance now and would like to get back to a job where I'm doing new development.", they always respond "Oh, your unqualified to do new development." So it is kind of a career death spiral. Once you have several bad jobs, people assume you're unqualified for anything better.