[dmoney]

> The biggest fuckup in the software industry is that maintenance jobs usually get passed to junior programmers ...

Agreed. Moreover, maintenance isn't great at teaching anything but maintenance.

> The trick, and very few companies have figured this out, is to create a "maintenance engineer" career track...

That might be a good idea. I think it should be something you're promoted into, rather than out of, after having spent a while writing and maintaining your own code.