As a student of Computer Science, a university can have two roles. One is to teach you how the very fundamentals of Computer Science and the other is to teach you how to think independently in situations which you may not have encountered before. Situations in which you can use your creativity and intelligence to develop better solutions. The latter is highly important because that is the one which makes use of all your gray matter. But now I feel it may not be so important.

How many jobs can you think of in the industry where you will be working on something new? Something exciting? Something that will keep you up at night trying to think out an elegant yet logical solution? Not many I would say. Most of the time, when you join a place as a Software Developer or a Programmer or an Analyst, you will be working on something that has been developed by someone else. Sometimes it will be interesting, most of the time, not. Most of the time you will be maintaining, and not developing. It is no one’s fault, it just the way industry works.

The Software Developer is dead. Long live the Software Maintainer.