[carlos-menezes]

It really depends on a bunch of factors: the environment, company structure, your role — you get the gist.

Early on, most time goes into writing new code, with some design docs if the team is structured — this is as simple as writing a README.md or having a static documentation website.

Once you have users, writing new features slows down, and more time shifts to bug fixes, refactoring, and keeping things running. In startups, this transition happens later since growth takes priority. I haven't worked for any large companies yet but I assume they tend to balance maintenance earlier.

[krishadi]

Just curious to know if you see the following trend:

As a codebase matures, the amount of time spent of code maintenance increases and with bug fixes, it gets harder to spot them and the amount of code that is required to solve them is little.

[ruraljuror]

Yes. We have at least one team dedicated to identifying bugs and maintaining technical quality. For example they statistically analyze our CI runs to identify regressions. They find some subtle bugs that would be difficult to identify through one's own experience.

https://lethain.com/managing-technical-quality/ discusses when it makes sense to build such a team.

[scarface_74]

This is a team that no one interested in their career progression should ever be on. This is usually a dead end and almost impossible to spin in behavioral interviews.

[ruraljuror]

Well, not my experience at all and combining that with the link I posted, I suspect you are mistaking what I am referring to. What are you basing your statement on?

[scarface_74]

Let’s say I am interviewing two people with the same technical skills.

One says that they have spent the last couple of years fixing bugs and analyzing the CI builds. The other talks about leading major new initiatives or being responsible for a major new feature and I dig into it. Guess which one I’m going to hire?

In the terms of promo docs, which shows more “impact”, “scope” and “dealing with ambiguity”?

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html

[ruraljuror]

It sounds like you would hire the one building CRUD apps. Perhaps I was unclear in my original post, technical quality teams don’t analyze CI and fix bugs. The team in my org builds sophisticated tools to analyze CI runs and teams self service the bug fixes. When you are operating at large scale and delivering products, there is no limit to impact or scope; ambiguity is inherent.