I think we should be putting more effort into recognizing/compensating those involved in maintenance work rather than steering folks away from it. The raw technology invention is important, but the maintenance work is what makes it ship and continue to work for customers. There are also plenty of widely-used projects remain relevant only due to maintenance. Projects like OpenSSL or the Linux Kernel come to mind here.
Don't downvote because someone hurts your feelings - that's not what this site is for, guys.
It is difficult to tell if not-agreeing is due to a difference of opinion or the statement being off topic.
Thus while it may seem natural to cast to two directions the implicit difference between agreeing or not is actually more nuanced. The /reason/ is important in the latter case.
Next time I have a say in hiring I'm not even going to bother looking at people who have only done green fields work. They've never had the opportunity to learn from their (or others) mistakes.
> Ask yourself this: who is the most famous maintainer you can think of? (Not someone who devised an innovation and then maintained it - pure maintenance)
What do you consider innovation? Two I'd point to are Bram Moolenaar (vim) and Linus Torvalds. They both wanted to clone existing systems, not to innovate. The same goes for many other open source creators, they had a need to solve, it wasn't a creative exercise.
It's a tradeoff. Innovating employee #10 at a big succesful startup will be better-rewarded than your average maintaining employee at, say, Facebook today, but that "maintainer" is going to be far better rewarded than innovating employee #5 at some-startup-whose-new-thing-proves-unwanted.
It seems to me that the best businesses are mostly about maintaining and profiting from some technology. Startups are advised to keep costs very low until they have "product-market fit", that is, until they have innovated enough to have made something that people want. After product-market fit has been achieved, marketing and sales begin to dominate; the technical innovation is over except for maintenance and incremental improvement.
Most businesses don't require innovation at all. McDonald's, for example, didn't invent the hamburger, but it has grown large because of its ability to grow while maintaining high standards.
Even businesses that we would think of as very innovative don't make their profits on continual innovation as much as growing and maintaining a standard process. YCombinator, for example, has a process of selecting great companies and nurturing them. The companies do a lot of innovating, but YC itself is basically maintaining and incrementally improving the innovation of Paul Graham and the other original founders.
Profit comes during the maintenance stage.
McDonalds and its competitors have been continually innovating on the details of how to provider hamburgers and chips to customers quickly and cheaply.
The pope.
I can think of a few, actually. Pretty much every BDFL in every open source project ever. Most famous is probably Linus Torvalds. He invented the first version of Linux, yes, but he's been primarily a maintainer not inventor ever since.
Everything you've mentioned doesn't count.
Ask yourself this: who is the most famous maintainer you can think of? (Not someone who devised an innovation and then maintained it - pure maintenance)