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Comment by idiocrat | Hacker News Reader

For some reason not many people like the "maintenance" type of work.

Maintenance type work tends to be chasing issues you don't personally care about in increasingly arcane edge cases or trying to intuit why someone else, who has moved on to something that sounds way more exciting than this, came up with a specific solution.

Even more so in a lot of orgs maintenance work gets hit by the "cost center" mentality and management only rewards not hearing about it.

Not full time, but documenting interfaces, speeding up tests, generating stubs and harnesses, profiling pain points - all these I find to be meditative tasks, and I do them when I'm not 100%.

I can do about 4-5 hours a day of "difficult" programming, but then I can easily do another 4-5 hours of this maintenance type work, and the cumulative effects of repeated maintenance time keeps everything running super smoothly.

I'd add that the cumulative effects of always knowing that the maintenance backlog is under control and that you always have time for the maintenance makes it much easier to consistently deliver the 4-5 hours of "difficult" programming.

The reason is simple. Maintenance work doesn't progress your career.

Why bother?

That's not the reason. The work itself is not fun.

Even if the whole project has no career purpose, it's more fun to write new code.

It can be fun, it just depends on who you are. Sadly most developers prefer to follow PM and churn in features instead of this precious work.

I actually enjoyed a maintenance project I was on. There was less time pressure. Finding and fixing a bug is a logic puzzle in its own right.

So things can be largely a question of perspective.

I actually love chasing down other people's bugs. I often get to fix other developers new shiny features shortly after they've hit production. And I love the challenge.

It's also nice that bug chasing has less of an expectation of giving good times estimates, which the software industry is famously poor at anyway.

Well, if it were fun, it would lose its shine if you're constantly being told it doesn't matter to the business.

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