You don't have to have a super awesome job, for example one company I worked for went through a phase where they didn't have enough coders to cover support and development for about 9 months.
We spent 95% of our time fielding calls from users (no first line, management's bright idea) and fixing bugs on old legacy code (vbscript when everyone else was on C#).
There were some developers who got a lot more support calls done than the others.
And then there were some developers who would refactor the code, write tools and other little programs and upgrade the in-house support system to make everyone's life easier and quicker to fix the bugs, learning while they did it.
It probably won't surprise many that those two sets comprised of exactly the same developers.
We spent 95% of our time fielding calls from users (no first line, management's bright idea) and fixing bugs on old legacy code (vbscript when everyone else was on C#).
There were some developers who got a lot more support calls done than the others.
And then there were some developers who would refactor the code, write tools and other little programs and upgrade the in-house support system to make everyone's life easier and quicker to fix the bugs, learning while they did it.
It probably won't surprise many that those two sets comprised of exactly the same developers.