[qwerta]

Why everyone has to write new code to learn?

I find best way to learn is to read existing code. When I find interesting project, I download source code and read it from top to bottom. I may even fix a few bugs before hitting compiler.

[collyw]

You need good quality code to begin with. I have had a couple of jobs as a maintenance programmer for large projects, and the code on one was not something you could learn from. On the other hand I have been playing about with some Django third party modules, upgrading them to Python 3 for my project, and that is code I can learn from.

[qwerta]

I started as maintenance programmer. I learned from that and now I just walk away from bad code, unless I get resources to fix it.

[collyw]

One of the jobs was for an investment bank. The job was crap. No one in my team of 5 lasted much more than a year. And sadly they did have the resources to hire more developers and address the problem that way. Brute force recruitment.