I'm doing 90% maintenance and 10% development, is this normal?
- by TiredProgrammer
I have just recently started my career as a web developer for a medium sized company. As soon as I started I got the task of expanding an existing application (badly coded, developed by multiple programmers over the years, handles the same tasks in different ways, zero structure)
So after I had successfully extended this application with the requested functionality, they gave me the task to fully maintain the application. This was of course not a problem, or so I thought. But then I got to hear I wasn't allowed to improve the existing code and to only focus on bug fixes when a bug gets reported.
From then on I have had 3 more projects just like the above, that I now also have to maintain. And I got 4 projects where I was allowed to create the application from scratch, and I have to maintain those as well.
At this moment I'm slightly beginning to get crazy from the daily mails of users (read managers) for each application I have to maintain. They expect me to handle these mails directly while also working on 2 other new projects (and there are already 5 more projects lined up after those). The sad thing is I have yet to receive a bug report on anything that I have coded myself, for that I have only received the occasional lets do things 180 degrees different change requests.
Anyway, is this normal? In my opinion I'm doing the work equivalent of a whole team of developers.
Was I an idiot when I initially expected things to be different?
I guess this post has turned into a big rant, but please tell me that this is not the same for every developer.
P.S. My salary is almost equal if not lower then that of a cashier at a supermarket.
