HACKER Q&A
📣 ijidak

Is there more money in greenfield software projects or maintenance?


It seems that most software contractors target greenfield projects -- e.g. We'll help you build your app idea.

Of course, those projects also tend to use newer technologies.

However, I'm certain, the base of existing code is orders of magnitude larger than new projects in development.

In your experience/opinion, is it more lucrative (hourly rate and volume) to build a consulting business to target a legacy technology like .NET WCF?

Or, do the hourly rates tend to be lower, and opportunities fewer, for projects extending and maintaining legacy technologies?

  👤 eschneider Accepted Answer ✓
I've done both and there are plenty of opportunities. If you're going to specialize in maintenance, the skills you need aren't so much in any particular legacy technology (in fact, you need to be ready to dive in and work with whatever they have and act like you like it. :) What you really need, is skills for exploring a new code base, figuring out what it does, and how best to modify it. If you can do that, you're golden.
👤 PaulHoule
If people are hiring 1099's or agencies to do maintenance I think they are doing it wrong.

There's a certain kind of bullshit with greenfield projects that comes out of the fact that the demonstrated value of the system is zero, that is, is hypothetical that any value is going to come out of the project at all.

If a system is worth maintaining, it is obviously producing value. So different dynamics come into play, particularly there is something particularly thankless about maintenance work. You will always run into people who say "it took you two months to do that? I could do it over the weekend" who have no idea how many responsibilities the system has, how many stakeholders are affected by a change, etc.