Throughout most of my career reading and maintaining code got fobbed off on the new programmers and the less skilled. Maintenance programming has a bad reputation, partly because it requires reading and figuring out someone else's code.
Now I make a living reading and maintaining code no one else will touch. Lots of companies can't afford to rewrite a mostly-working system, or they can't take the risk. I found a niche doing maintenance work and now I enjoy fixing what other programmers have said they can't maintain. Freelance maintenance work pays just as well as green-fields development and has fewer customer hassles, too.
Neat. How do you find these gigs? I actually like working on old stuff and refactoring myself.
Reading code also doesn't really get rewarded. It's easier to declare the work of people who aren't there anymore as bad and rewrite everything.