... your censorial asterisks italicized part of your post ...

If you're good at cleaning up "pile of shit" code, you will always have work!

It's s lot of fun with the right attitude.

I've made a great career of being a code janitor and doing what others don't want, while having a good attitude. In the last few years, I just rewrite everything I possibly can in Rust and I've yet to regret it.

> I just rewrite everything I possibly can in Rust and I've yet to regret it.

And hopefully no one else regrets it...

By then you're onto the next thing and it's their problem, right?

Thus is the circle of (engineering) life.

Just kidding. Please write maintainable code.

"Please write maintainable code"

Not in the requirements, sorry.

He's using RUST. Haven't you seen all the blogicles that explain how it's impossible to write bad code in rust??

> Please write maintainable code

Most people don't know how to do this, because it's actually hard, and I don't think it's being taught much in programmer education.

I certainly had to learn "on the job", and probably spent 10 years before I got good at it.

I learned the most by fixing bugs. After a while, I started seeing the patterns of why this bug had occurred, and started writing code do avoid the traps.

> a code janitor

I prefer the term troubleshooter specialising in legacy code, but "code janitor" definitely has felt more appropriate at times.

Legacy rescue

Work? Almost certainly. Career? Not very likely.

The problem is sometimes your organization does not reward these efforts at all.