Maintenance programmer
Your description of this role sounds familiar... I had a job like this over 10 years ago, and they were looking for a Jr. programmer who would "learn and grow into the job." They wanted somebody with enough skill to work with C++ and MFC. One person there told me that one reason some developers were leaving was they were already real good at the technology, and were bored with it.
I worked on adding features to existing applications, and fixing bugs. There was legacy stuff around, but I didn't work on it. They had had done a bunch of application rewrites, going from Delphi, and 16-bit Windows apps. written in C, to 32-bit MFC apps, or VB 6 w/ COM. I worked on one of the rewrite projects, but everything was purely 32-bit for me. Fortunately most of the software was recent enough that most of the people who wrote it were still around, and I could contact them. Everything we were working towards was considered current (though aging) technology at the time. It was just at the beginning of the shift in business apps. from GUI to web. A bunch of developers were leaving, taking Java/internet developer positions. That was the hot new thing.
I actually had a good time in the job. I was disappointed that it ended. The technology was on the way out, but I didn't know it. I think the truth was, though, that I wasn't around long enough to find out why people didn't think the place was such great shakes. There were a few people there who had been there a while, and expressed their frustrations with management. Some of them were the ones who left for "greener pastures." The fact that they complained didn't strike me as odd. I had heard developers complain about management for years, and it had nothing to do with working as a maintenance/legacy developer.
I had heard of web applications. I worked on a prototype for one in 1997. Most of them were being done in C++ and Perl, or VC++ or VB 6 with COM. Every time I heard how they were done, they sounded like a kludge, and I wanted nothing to do with them. It didn't sound cutting edge to me. It sounded like a mess.
I didn't see my role in the job I got as a "career killer." I guess for most people it would've been, given the circumstances at the time. The point where I got laid off, along with most of the people there, was right during the dot com bust. I went for a few years after that not able to find paying work in my field. That washed a lot of people out. The only way out for me was to work on web applications. So that's what I did for a couple years. Even after that experience, GUI development made more sense to me in terms of a coherent design concept. Working in ASP.Net didn't improve my perception of how web apps. were built.
