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I'm doing 90% maintenance and 10% development, is this normal?

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Re: I'm doing 90% maintenance and 10% development, is this normal?

#41

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #33
bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #9

> (badly coded, developed by multiple programmers over the years, handles the same tasks in different ways, zero structure) Yeah, that's totally normal for a mature application. Better get used to it. > At this moment I'm slightly beginning to get crazy from the daily mails of users (read managers) for each application I have to maintain. Maybe not normal, but common . It's really up to you to manage your business re…

demand more money now, concentrate on learning to work with people, but do not give up on code quality. Not entirely, anyway. You can't turn the whole app into a good one in any reasonable time, but when you fix a bug, take time to apply the boy scout rule ( http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1235624&... ) Don't put that down as a separate task that your management can approve or deny, it's part of doing…

I should get this reply onto programmers.stackexchange, where the original poster can see it, right?

Re: I'm doing 90% maintenance and 10% development, is this normal?

#42

Post by philbarr »

gcb wrote: post #17
bobbles wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first real programming job was 100% maintenance. It was horrible. Luckily I was able to get out after 6 months, but still wonder about the other guys I was working with there.. hopefully they got out.

He should be glad it's not 90% maintenance and 10% meetings

He should be glad it's not 90% meetings and 10% maintenance you mean, which is what's waiting for him if he stays in the business long enough.

Re: I'm doing 90% maintenance and 10% development, is this normal?

#44

Post by Produce »

Sounds like he's working at a software agency considering the number of "products". Let me say this loud and clear:

DO NOT WORK AT A SOFTWARE AGENCY

People who start these kinds of businesses are not entrepreneurs. They are naive idiots who think that having 100 bosses instead of 1 means that they are independent and actually own a business. In reality, they are splitting their time between many projects and doing them all very, very badly. Anyone worth their salt will leave a position like that and either get hired by a company who have their own software product or start a business (read: not agency) of their own.

If we all boycott this type of business then they will have nobody working for them and will slowly die off.

Re: I'm doing 90% maintenance and 10% development, is this normal?

#45

Post by ryanmolden »

nandemo wrote: post #25
michaelochurch wrote: post #5

No, not even at entry-level. 90% maintenance is a disaster. 60 to 75 percent might be typical for entry-level programmers, and that's bad, but 90 is abysmal. If development is done properly, "maintenance" isn't some massive chore. It's pay-as-you-go and takes the form of proper testing, early design review and refactoring, and a shared sense of responsibility for the upkeep of the code (none of this "give maintenance…

> No, not even at entry-level. 90% maintenance is a disaster. 60 to 75 percent might be typical for entry-level programmers, and that's bad, but 90 is abysmal. In my experience and from what I've gathered from friends and coworkers over the years, ratios like that are actually quite normal. And it doesn't have to do with entry-level vs. senior. I suppose a lot of HNers are working at tech startups or otherwise compan…

I think it has more to do with primarily only having experience with code you wrote yourself or a small codebase written by yourself and others. I have a tongue in cheek saying of "If you haven't maintained code written by others then you probably write code like an asshole". You learn a lot about what never to do by working with very large (and/or very old) codebases that you yourself didn't design. Also, to be fair to the people that did design them, even your greatest most beautiful design will look terrible to some people, and likely to posterity.

Re: I'm doing 90% maintenance and 10% development, is this normal?

#46

Post by Sakes »

Start looking for a new job immediately.

As a developer you need 2 things from a job. An opportunity to increase your salary, and opportunities to increase your skills as a developer.

I started out at a web shop, I spent roughly 4 years there, and the learning stopped after the first year. Web shops are not about creating great solutions, they are about creating good enough custom solutions because web shops by nature are service based companies.

Find yourself a nice little SaaS company where you respect the developers and are given opportunities to create clean maintainable code, and explore different technologies.

Otherwise you will just be spending the next few years of your career playing find the broken inline sql query and the only thing you will learn is defensive programming.

Re: I'm doing 90% maintenance and 10% development, is this normal?

#47

Post by SonicSoul »

while quitting is the easiest choice, there are other ways to deal with this situation and actually making your mark. This could really be an opportunity to do something great. After all, if you go to a place where the code is already great and while work will be much easier and more fun, there may be less opportunities at making your mark.

the maintenance probably involves fixing bugs, and dealing with limitation of of the system. Instead of fixing those in a tactical way, one could carefully think the problem through, and provide a more meaningful solution (via complete refactoring at times) that actually makes the system n% better. Of course there is no luxury of being able to spend days on such a problem, so initially nights and weekends may be necessary to break through. Providing meaningful solutions on your own time will achieve at least 2 things. Your peers and management will take notice and start listening when you speak about the system instead of just giving you a task to patch bug #9821, and you will gain more intimate knowledge of the system than anyone around you (since you refactored it). This may take a few years, but through such hard work, you will gain ownership and control and reputation for being the person who made a difference.

Re: I'm doing 90% maintenance and 10% development, is this normal?

#48

Post by engtech »

jms_ wrote: post #19
bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #9

> (badly coded, developed by multiple programmers over the years, handles the same tasks in different ways, zero structure) Yeah, that's totally normal for a mature application. Better get used to it. > At this moment I'm slightly beginning to get crazy from the daily mails of users (read managers) for each application I have to maintain. Maybe not normal, but common . It's really up to you to manage your business re…

That's a terrible attitude to encourage. Accepting the status-quo as a junior is a great way to encourage them to never improve or question the more debatable practices. Teaching juniors to care about software quality and software maintainability is hugely important in order to encourage an overall improvement within the software dev industry.

When I was junior I really thought that everything can be fixed.

As I've gained more experience I've realized that maintaining a code base is like any relationship with conflict -- you have to pick your battles carefully or everything turns into a fight / falls apart.

Re: I'm doing 90% maintenance and 10% development, is this normal?

#49

Post by pcopley »

jms_ wrote: post #19
bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #9

> (badly coded, developed by multiple programmers over the years, handles the same tasks in different ways, zero structure) Yeah, that's totally normal for a mature application. Better get used to it. > At this moment I'm slightly beginning to get crazy from the daily mails of users (read managers) for each application I have to maintain. Maybe not normal, but common . It's really up to you to manage your business re…

That's a terrible attitude to encourage. Accepting the status-quo as a junior is a great way to encourage them to never improve or question the more debatable practices. Teaching juniors to care about software quality and software maintainability is hugely important in order to encourage an overall improvement within the software dev industry.

Yes, but a junior developer's role in any company regardless of size is most definitely not to come in and say how they could do it better and the company should change their workflow.

Re: I'm doing 90% maintenance and 10% development, is this normal?

#50

Post by chris_wot »

There are two issues here:

1. He's been given too much work for one person, and they all seem to be have the same priority. I'd be discussing this one with management, try to stay for at the most 12 months to get experience, and if nothing changes make a leap to another job.

2. He can't refactor the code base. Not even if he adds unit tests.

It's actually point 2 that concerns me the most. The best that he can do is just do some unit tests for every function of the code that he changes to ensure that it doesn't break any other aspect of the code.

Apart from this, not much can be done. Unless he can move on to another role, or perhaps document the code structure or something, then all he can do is jump ship once a suitable amount of time has been had. Sucks, but it happens :(

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