Software maintenance as a whole is often given a low status. You do not often hear that a company's top talent is assigned to maintenance tasks. Perhaps they need be.
It is no wonder why the best developers do not want to be assigned to maintenance. There are often poor working conditions. This applies both to the physical environment and resources you are provided. It might also apply to the technical personnel you must work with.
Like many other areas of software engineering, I have heard that the maintenance phase is more and more becoming an activity that can be outsourced. This is understandable given the low status of the activity.
However maintenance is not all doom and gloom. There are some fun aspects to working on the maintenance team. You normally can achieve quick closure on issues. Bugs can be researched and resolved within a week. Normal software development cycles are very long, with customers not seeing the end product for a year or more. Given a broken maintenance project, you can implement process improvement and hopefully see positive results from your efforts.
On a personal note, I myself have spent the latter part of my career in the software maintenance realm. There have been a lot of ups and downs. Luckily I am on an up cycle right now.
