I&#x27;m having trouble finding any numbers that suggest greenfield development is more common than maintenance development. My own experience is that most of my work is done on existing code bases, and I am more productive when the coders before me spent the extra time to make sure the code is adaptable to new situations.<p>Can you point to some empirical evidence to the contrary?<p>Edit: I had some more thoughts about this, specifically that there is a survivorship bias to legacy code. Not all projects survive, but when they do that code can live a long life of maintenance. If you are involved in the startup world, it may make more sense to get it done quick &amp; dirty in order to get funding than to write &quot;good&quot; code. That might explain the disparity of our experiences.