<story><title>The joys of maintenance programming (2011)</title><url>https://typicalprogrammer.com/the-joys-of-maintenance-programming</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><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></comment>
<story><title>The joys of maintenance programming (2011)</title><url>https://typicalprogrammer.com/the-joys-of-maintenance-programming</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jebarker</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m currently on a sort of sabbatical from greenfield research projects. I&amp;#x27;m doing maintenance programming on a large widely used open source project. It&amp;#x27;s been really refreshing. I didn&amp;#x27;t realize how much I was feeling the pressures of 15+ years of greenfield research. By contrast the maintenance programming is clearly defined, easier to put down at the end of the day and unambiguously useful. I&amp;#x27;m also rapidly improving in my debugging, code understanding, profiling and optimizing skills which will make me a better programmer when I do return to writing new code.</text></comment>