Yet the best engineers in the field aren’t working on legacy banking apps. The problem is that once a product is put into production and the hard problems are solved, the engineering becomes significantly less challenging (unless you’re in an ultra rare scenario of exponential growth).
The problem we have in software is that we have engineers build bridges and then somehow expect them to stay around to paint the thing, change light bulbs, etc and stay fulfilled. A person who is an expert at making new things won’t like being in maintenance. It’s that simple.
Sure, that's absolutely true. But it doesn't mean that you need to rebuild already working stuff over and over.
It's much more fun to improve the status quo by inventing something nice as to repeat the work of the past generation (only painting things in a different color).
The problem we have in software is that we have engineers build bridges and then somehow expect them to stay around to paint the thing, change light bulbs, etc and stay fulfilled. A person who is an expert at making new things won’t like being in maintenance. It’s that simple.