>At least, this is my experience in the large FAANG type companies. We already have so much code. Just figuring out what that code does and what else to do with it constitutes the majority of the work.

That sounds horrible. I've always sought out smaller companies that need stuff built. It certainly doesn't pay as much as SV companies but it's pretty stimulating. Sometimes being a big fish in a small pond is pretty nice.

IMO, maintaining someone else's code is probably the worst type of programming job there is, especially if it's bad /disjointed code. A lot of people can make a good living doing it though. It would be nice if AI could alleviate the pain of learning and figuring out a gnarly codebase.