| Yes, it's normal to do 90% maintenance. But there are two issues here, one is regarding the tasks having to do more with updating/enhancing an existing product, as opposed to creating something new from scratch. This is normal, and not inherently bad in any way. The other issue is the one of mismanagement, which is obvious in this case, and very common. The amount of technical debt indicates that previous developers have either been incompetent, the code reviews/quality control lacking, or they have been under serious pressure forced to cut corners. Managers thinking that "dump every issue regarding this product directly on this developer guy with an urgent e-mail" is actually management. While in fact they push the responsibilities of prioritizing/delegating/allocating resources, onto the developer. This is really bad management. To me these are basically signs of a company competing in the market segment of quick and dirty, good enough, pretty low quality software/services. Think about it, there are huge demands for lower end products and services. But it's not very fulfilling to work for such a company. |