Yeah, the difficult bit is never writing new code. It’s maintaining what you have. The ones that bug me are the developers who only build prototypes, impress management, and move on to the next thing before they ever get dragged down into working on production systems. Management always thinks those are the talented ones because they build new stuff, then they never ask anyone but those people to build new stuff, and this confirms their belief that those people have a special talent. The rest of us are just busy translating their toy prototypes into actual production-ready systems and maintaining them.