“We need to have this feature shipped next week”, “we got to add this feature the competition has, or our customers will not use our software”. I have heard these words so many times over the last few years.

My work now primarily involves maintaining software which gets no new features. Just minor tweaks to fix issues which now surface due to data scale not considered for before. A few tweaks to database indexes. No new features, just small improvements and bug fixes.

I considered this peaceful work. There is an urgency to get the issue fixed as the customer has been waiting to generate that report, but improving software already used by a lot of people gives me immense joy. Customers hardly write to us anymore asking for new features to be added. They know what the software has to offer and are happy with how it fits into their day to day workflow. What makes them not happy is when the software is not available to be used or displays a blank screen when generating reports.

Focusing my time on availability and speed aspects of the software, rather than rushing to ship new features has been an area I did not think I would enjoy spending time on.