We find it relatively easy to hire developers to work on various projects.The problem arises when the project is finished but still needs to be supported. We really battle to get people to join the support team. It's seen as dead-end, career-limiting, boring, second-class etc.Currently, we get round this by getting the project team to assign some of their team to the support team for a while. Part of the assignment is to do a brain dump of the project so that the support team understands it. This works as long as the assignment is only for a fixed period.Trying to hire people to work in support full-time is a problem. There are few applications and the calibre is not particularly high.(The financial reality though is that support can be very lucrative for a company and once you get a reputation, you get approached by other companies to do their support even though you weren't involved in the original development.)
How to you sell support as an career option
interview
Don'tTo me the best option here is not to separate the developers into support and non-support in the first place.  IMHO there are three main reasons:people that write things that are hard to support do not learn until they have to support these things.people doing only support will usually take the path of least resistance in correcting an error even if it hampers future work.the theoretical time savings in staying on schedule in the new development by having the separate support developers is always more than consumed by having to provide instruction or repeat work.Within the dev team you can have people that have maintenance tasks or take an approach of letting the maintenance tasks be the training grounds for the newer team members, but if you try to sell it as the long term goal of the position you will only attract people that will give you heartburn or people that will soon be on their way out.There always needs to be a clear path to getting out of a 100% support dev role, and/or a certain percentage of new development work to keep good people interested.You do not want to attract the sort of people that are happy in that role indefinitely and you are never going to convince otherwise good devs to take that role and keep it long term unless you are offering the kind of pay that would never have them considering a career move.