Maintenance never seems to be respected, but without it none of us could do what we do. It applies to garbage men, and even tech.

I worked tech support for nearly 20 years on various things, big networking equipment, mainframe equipment. Some companies paid really well and made their money / stayed afloat through hard times because they had a reputation for providing high quality tech support. But in the end every company seems to devalue it eventually. Quality of management starts to dip, resources are slowly siphoned away, some management mistakes that because problems get reported through support channels that is somehow always support's fault. Things start to turn and it goes bad, someone decides it looks good on a resume to outsource and so on.

Before I left my last support job the local manager decided to cancel the quarterly pizza party (maybe couple hundred bucks in pizza) to save money ... I was taking a buy out (I was fortunate) and as a fun way to go out I held my own pizza party, spent my own money ;) Company pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars and I held the pizza party.

I moved on and now I write code where you get paid more / valued more / more respect making new things. It's hard to avoid the fact that maintenance is just not respected.