Programming is based on hero worship. Anyone who makes even half an effort to better themselves as a software developer will encounter famous names from the past - those that "made a difference" by creating languages, operating systems and algorithms. Keyword here is "create". This is not an industry that celebrates maintence programmers. There's no glory for the guy that spent 20 years keeping the system that your banking transactions depend upon.

So naturally young programmers will see to be the next Richie, Torvalds or Knuth and to do that you gotta create something new. Gotta change the world

As a fairly young programmer, I think it's not necessarily hero worship (though that does play a part). I think it's because a lot of young programmers define their identities in terms of what they do. This is especially prevalent in the free software community. If you're going to define yourself by what you work on, it doesn't seem very fulfilling to just keep an existing project running without having the freedom to make drastic changes that would improve the project.

It should noted though that the above points about Red Hat and "boring" (as much I hate calling people's work boring) don't sit right with me. I know quite a few people who work at Red Hat on very interesting technologies. At SUSE, I work on fairly interesting technologies as well. The key aspect that makes SUSE (or Red Hat) "boring" is that we have effectively solved the problem of release engineering and maintenance (though in recent years SUSE has been improving on it further through openSUSE Leap and the recent plans for SLE15). The funny thing is that if upstreams could do their own release engineering correctly, SUSE and Red Hat would have a weaker value proposition.

The "boring" comment isn't meant to denigrate people's work. Rather, it should be taken as a complement for a job being done well. In fact I've heard the "boring" comment from a couple RH employees myself. So, I think they understand what is being said, rather than taking it in a derogatory manner.

You think that Torvalds or K&R are famous because of their creation and not for the long-term maintenance of their projects? That's pretty shallow thinking in my opinion. Yes they created things that we use and love, but we use and love them because those creators took years of their lives and dedicated them to the maintenance (both technical and political) of their projects.

I for one admire them for their dedication and vision far more than for their creations and wish more programmers would try to be like them.

There are some wannabe-heroes, but they aren't so widespread.

The vast majority is just being pragmatic. Trendy toys and 'designed and implemented new X' in resume looks so much better for career than 'maintained something old so customers were happy'. Of course, there are some technologies that helps to make pretty good money even being ancient, like COBOL, APL, AS/400 and IMS. But for how long? So it seems rational to move forward instead.

That said, if you've got COBOL, Fortran, etc on your resume you're pretty much guaranteed to get asked about it in an interview.

Maybe discussion on mainframes transaction processing and COBOL features helping to implement it the way we know it thesedays as 'Cloud Functions' or 'AWS Lambda' might be a little bit more fruitful than reversing linked list pointers on a blackboard.

I love the feeling of being lost I solving and how it can extend for hours in any particular day. It can happen with both old tech and new tech, old project or new project - the only requirement is large task. (Impossible in agile max 4 hours long task environment).

I havent seen people in that state for weeks on end. It explains peeks of productivity followed by drops of productivity. Does not explain long term crunch.

And I mean, programming is not nearly as risky as Base jumping. You don't die coding in wrong direction and you still get paid for it. It is annoying to be wrong, but imo, we are overusing word risk.