I can understand not wanting do maintenance, but I also wonder: How much is there to be made from dealing with all that legacy stuff from the last 20 years? I suspect it’s a lot.
Ignoring the money for a second, I think for some people (author clearly aside), maintenance work can be the interesting work. As long as there's buy-in from the business side of the house – they understand the goal in its full extent is to reduce technical debt and increase future development agility, and that there will be no visible changes to end users – it can be very rewarding to refactor old code.
Yes! Maintenance and refactoring is a huge creative opportunity, if management isn't thwarting you. Dismissing languages and maintenance outright makes think the author is just difficult to work with. Even in modern places, maintenance and refactoring simply need to be done every so often. That's part of the job, we can't only work on things that we want on someone else's dime.
I can understand not wanting do maintenance, but I also wonder: How much is there to be made from dealing with all that legacy stuff from the last 20 years? I suspect it’s a lot.