Does anyone enjoy doing Production Support over doing Greenfield development?
This is a live grenade of a question, but I'll pose it. I posted something like this the other day and got some insults and insinuations of my development ability from people who have never worked with me. Please, go get a hobby.
But I'm serious. The general wisdom is that developers are happier building new things rather than chasing prod issues and digging for root causes. Does anyone find the opposite to be true?
I think production support has the potential to be frustrating in highly complex systems that the developer just doesn't know well enough. Perhaps it is someone junior, perhaps it is someone new, perhaps the system doesn't have great logging, perhaps the system is over-engineered, brittle and constantly on fire.
For developers who developed the system, who "know where the bodies are buried" and all the little nooks and crannies and hacks, they can be seen as gods because every little thing that goes wrong in production, they can quickly fix. That's job security there!
It can lead to issues down the road, though, if these people leave the team and the replacements don't have this depth of knowledge. I think that's where a lot of developers prefer to build a system from the ground up, that way they are the domain knowledge gods and can easily swat away most prod issues.