<story><title>The joys of maintenance programming (2011)</title><url>https://typicalprogrammer.com/the-joys-of-maintenance-programming</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jckahn</author><text>Agreed. Imagine you’re a CEO: Why on earth would you want your expensive engineers reworking something that already makes money? It seems much more sensible to leave the working code alone and focus on new revenue-generating opportunities.</text></item><item><author>JohnBooty</author><text>Maintenance programming for pay can be rewarding &lt;i&gt;iffffffffffffffff&lt;/i&gt; management has a deep understanding of and appreciation for the task. There can be a lot of joy and satisfaction in adding tests, fixing edge cases, fulfilling user needs, &amp;quot;quality of life&amp;quot; improvements, optimizing. &lt;i&gt;Honing.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;My experience is that this is almost never the case.&lt;p&gt;Generally, management does not understand or appreciate why it&amp;#x27;s a slog, why you might want to refactor this or that, etc.&lt;p&gt;Obviously a lot of this falls upon the engineer. It&amp;#x27;s your job to communicate and demonstrate. Helps if you have other engineers backing you up and presenting a unified message. Also helps if management is technical enough to understand what you&amp;#x27;re saying instead of simply believing -- or &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; believing -- you.&lt;p&gt;But maaaan. Uphill battle! I&amp;#x27;m burnt out on it. I&amp;#x27;ve decided I need to seek greenfield stuff. Maybe forever. But definitely for now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fsckboy</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;focus on new revenue-generating opportunities&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;in mature industries, there aren&amp;#x27;t new revenue generating opportunities, there is only getting better at what you ordinarily do; all marketshare growth comes at the expense of competitors.</text></comment>
<story><title>The joys of maintenance programming (2011)</title><url>https://typicalprogrammer.com/the-joys-of-maintenance-programming</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jckahn</author><text>Agreed. Imagine you’re a CEO: Why on earth would you want your expensive engineers reworking something that already makes money? It seems much more sensible to leave the working code alone and focus on new revenue-generating opportunities.</text></item><item><author>JohnBooty</author><text>Maintenance programming for pay can be rewarding &lt;i&gt;iffffffffffffffff&lt;/i&gt; management has a deep understanding of and appreciation for the task. There can be a lot of joy and satisfaction in adding tests, fixing edge cases, fulfilling user needs, &amp;quot;quality of life&amp;quot; improvements, optimizing. &lt;i&gt;Honing.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;My experience is that this is almost never the case.&lt;p&gt;Generally, management does not understand or appreciate why it&amp;#x27;s a slog, why you might want to refactor this or that, etc.&lt;p&gt;Obviously a lot of this falls upon the engineer. It&amp;#x27;s your job to communicate and demonstrate. Helps if you have other engineers backing you up and presenting a unified message. Also helps if management is technical enough to understand what you&amp;#x27;re saying instead of simply believing -- or &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; believing -- you.&lt;p&gt;But maaaan. Uphill battle! I&amp;#x27;m burnt out on it. I&amp;#x27;ve decided I need to seek greenfield stuff. Maybe forever. But definitely for now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bbbobbb</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s not what the post is about. They describe the process as mostly fixing issues with existing software, so the motivation is that something is broken or not working as required anymore.&lt;p&gt;Refactoring it is just one of possible parts of the process, much opposed to &amp;#x27;yeah this legacy code is broken dogshit and needs to be rewritten even though the current software is already written, proven and works for 99% of the stuff we need&amp;#x27; approach.</text></comment>