<story><title>Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets</title><url>https://swizec.com/blog/the-3-budgets/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ponector</author><text>Both maintenance and testing are not valued by business. Because you cannot sell maintenance to the customer, you only can sell features.&lt;p&gt;From the developer&amp;#x27;s point of view maintenance also a thing to avoid. You cannot put a maintenance as a shiny point to your CV. Everyone wants to see your achievements, projects you shipped, and with modern technology, of course.</text></item><item><author>georgyo</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand our modern tech culture of saying maintenance is the last on the list; always getting chopped and cut; never getting a decent budget.&lt;p&gt;In 20 years and several different companies I have always heard this but never agreed with it.&lt;p&gt;Sure, the company wants new features to market, but the company also wants things to freaking work.&lt;p&gt;During layoffs and hiring freezes I have seen SRE type orgs fair better than their R&amp;amp;D siblings.&lt;p&gt;In only one place I worked was there this culture shift of always having to keep building new things and not reward maintaining old things. It actually shifted to that culture while I was there. Constant migration to new internal tools, constant depreciation, and half baked migration stories. After the people who built the product get their promotion they go off to the build their next portfolio piece. The new shiny quickly becomes unmaintained and a new team comes and builds yet another replacement. In 6 years one internally built tool was replaced 4 times with new internal tools, with users spread across all four.&lt;p&gt;You can say that this was just poor execution, but in reality saying maintenance is not valued by the business is incredibly toxic and leads to self destruction.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SamuelAdams</author><text>It depends on your business and your clients. Maintenance in the form of compliance always sells, albeit begrudgingly. If maintaining various compliance requirements is required (like DoD), then maintenance budgets are usually flush with cash.</text></comment>
<story><title>Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets</title><url>https://swizec.com/blog/the-3-budgets/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ponector</author><text>Both maintenance and testing are not valued by business. Because you cannot sell maintenance to the customer, you only can sell features.&lt;p&gt;From the developer&amp;#x27;s point of view maintenance also a thing to avoid. You cannot put a maintenance as a shiny point to your CV. Everyone wants to see your achievements, projects you shipped, and with modern technology, of course.</text></item><item><author>georgyo</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand our modern tech culture of saying maintenance is the last on the list; always getting chopped and cut; never getting a decent budget.&lt;p&gt;In 20 years and several different companies I have always heard this but never agreed with it.&lt;p&gt;Sure, the company wants new features to market, but the company also wants things to freaking work.&lt;p&gt;During layoffs and hiring freezes I have seen SRE type orgs fair better than their R&amp;amp;D siblings.&lt;p&gt;In only one place I worked was there this culture shift of always having to keep building new things and not reward maintaining old things. It actually shifted to that culture while I was there. Constant migration to new internal tools, constant depreciation, and half baked migration stories. After the people who built the product get their promotion they go off to the build their next portfolio piece. The new shiny quickly becomes unmaintained and a new team comes and builds yet another replacement. In 6 years one internally built tool was replaced 4 times with new internal tools, with users spread across all four.&lt;p&gt;You can say that this was just poor execution, but in reality saying maintenance is not valued by the business is incredibly toxic and leads to self destruction.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>v-erne</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt; Both maintenance and testing are not valued by business.&lt;p&gt;It depends on the incentives I suppose - if commission and bonuses for sales people comes only from new sales, then sure, maintenance is irrelevant and will be ignored.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; Because you cannot sell maintenance to the customer, you only can sell features.&lt;p&gt;No, that&amp;#x27;s not true at all. 
If sales people are properly incentivised to sell support contracts (their base salary being a percent of maintenance fee for example) then it will be sold like crazy. I have seen this happen at my company - at one point we did not need new sales to be profitable - just raking support contracts fees was enough to keep up costs and then some.</text></comment>