Life in Balance: Amit D. Chaudhary’s Blog
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Chapter 26: Learn to Love Maintenance ‘or’ (my alternative title) Maintenance should be minority or less of your work

from My Job Went to India And All I Got Was This Lousy Book 52 Ways to Save Your Job by Chad Fowler.

Excerpts from the chapter

• Though the caste system is officially dead in India, the hierarchical thinking it imposed lives on in the hearts and minds of its citizens.
• So, the motivating factors are the ability to be creative and the chance to make steps toward a promotion. The funny thing about it is that project work is not necessarily the best place to do either.
• Typically, if all is going well, customers will stay pretty hands-off with the daily management of the maintainers and their work.
• A hidden advantage of doing maintanence work is that the maintenance programmer often has the opportunity to interact directly with his or her customers.

My notes and comments

• Maintenance results in a software developer working on less and less relevant software (read less revenue to company), reducing work(read less engineers needed) and requires different skillset than new software development. However, it is part of a product cycle and a software developer’s work. Hence, do maintenance work, but do not let it become majority of your work, else you will never develop the skills to create complete systems. Think of it as changing a painting by enhancing a nose versus creating a new painting.
• Caste system, sadly is entrenched and alive in the modern India I knew, from Colleges to Office (Modern or Government.)
• It is true that creativity is needed for all sort of software development work. But maintenance is less creative than understanding requirements, putting that complete design together and making all that happen which makes the final product. Maintenance can result in promotion, but so will new software development, promotion depends on other factors including phase that a company is in, and so forth.
• Maintenance engineers are not hands off by management, as a matter of fact the opposite is true. If a critial bug fix comes in, expect more than one manager to visit you asking how is it going?, when will it be done? and can they do something?
• You will deal with customers in both type of work, in maintenance, the interaction will be, when will I get this fix, in new software, it will be I would like this and this.
• For some companies like startups, a lot of work will be new software. These jobs will be out of your reach, if you stay in maintenance only mode

Summary:

I disagree completely with the premise of the chapter. Get good at maintenance, but do not love it. Do not let it become majority for your work for more than short (6 month) durations.

Final verdict: Disagree

Comments, Thoughts?

Rest of Entries and Main Post: My Job Went to India, 52 Ways to Save Your Job: TOC: Notes and Comments