[JohnBooty]

This matches pretty closely with my experience.

An additional side effect is that management fails to understand what/why is going on and overvalues the skills of the "experienced devs" and undervalues the skills of the maintenance devs because they don't understand the order-of-magnitude speed advantage enjoyed by devs when writing greenfield code.

"Experienced Developer A wrote the whole damn system in three months! Now Maintenance Developer B wants three months just to add a few buttons?!?"

I've been both the experienced person and the junior maintenance person.

[nuancebydefault]

Exactly! As a maintenance dev, you tend not to get much praise, you need to continuously explain why things take so long. I'm currently adapting some code that is, in the eyes of management, adding an extra little wire, which should not be more than a day of work. In effect it will be more than 4 days plus some overtime...

[JohnBooty]

Yeah. I've been in the industry for 20+ years and I have not figured out a way to "shine" when tasked with maintenance work, other than finding ways to avoid such roles entirely.

The root issue is that management never seems to be able to grasp things on a technical level. I've tried to communicate this over the years, and have been praised for my communication skills in general, but I've never managed to bridge this particular gap.