Comment by shimman
11 hours ago
It's correct tho. If your entire career is nothing but greenfield development, you'll never know the result of your decisions or the impact of tech chosen.
Staff or principals that have a tenure of majority greenfield development are extremely dangerous to companies IMO. Especially if they get hired in a nontraditional tech company, like utilities, banking, or insurance.
Your list is places that treat development as a cost center, but greenfield-only devs don't want to touch that work with a 10-foot pole.
And if your entire career is nothing maintenance and sustaining projects, you'll never know what decisions it takes to build a greenfield application that lives long enough to become a graybeard.
You'll think you do because you see all the mistakes they made, but you'll only have cynical reasons for why those mistakes get made like "they don't care, they just make a mess and move on to the next job" or "they don't bother learning the tools/craft deeply enough moving, it's all speed for them".
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To indulge myself in the niceness a bit: I don't think you write comments like the one above if you've done both, yet having done both feels like an obvious requirement to be a well-rounded Staff/Principal.
Most maintenance work suffers because of decisions made at the 0 to 1 stage. And most greenfield work fails entirely, never maturing to the maintenance stage.
So both sides have to do something right in the face of challenges unique to their side. And having familiarity with both is extremely valuable for technical leadership.
This is an excellent point.
When working at larger orgs on legacy projects (which I have also done) you think "what sort of idiot did this?"
Then when you're the one tasked with getting a project shipped in two weeks that most reasonable engineers would argue needs two months, you start have to make strategic decisions at 2am about what maintainability issues will block the growth of the product on the way to funding and what ones can be fixed before 5pm by someone that will think you're an idiot in 3 years.