[willis936]

Features have a lot of development advantages over maintenance. Features are fun and rewarding to implement. Maintenance is boring. This seems small, but it's actually huge. Feature work can be done many times faster because of it. I got hired at my current job because people left because the feature phase was over and they didn't want to do maintenance. I'm probably going to leave because this work is simply not interesting.

[matthewmacleod]

I don't think I've ever worked in an environment where the tech team would have resisted the opportunity to take some time to refactor or update some systems that needed attention. In fact, they'd most likely be overjoyed and would much rather do this than implement features. YMMV from team to team, though.

[thinkharderdev]

I agree. I think people on HN generally underestimate the extent to which developers themselves push to work on new features instead of maintenance. It's often a different kind of feature though. I can't count how many times in my career devs (including me!) instantly jumped to "we need to rewrite X using new framework Y" in response to technical debt in X.

[k__]

I only saw that behavior in younger devs.

The average dev just does their job. Same as with the average person in every industry.

Sure, it's nice to do a cool feature, but most people don't work at interesting projects to start with, and they simply have to churn on. There isn't much difference between a new feature or maintenance in boring projects.

[drcongo]

I _love_ maintenance and fixing technical debt, much more than working on features.

[fendy3002]

And it's easier though if you have different skillset than feature development.

Essentially the features, flows and output are fixed and defined, so you don't need to think about that. Your skills at performance optimization, refactoring, unit testing and debugging really shines here.