A great many people are involved in maintaining existing buildings. This isn’t just a gotcha but reveals fundamentally faulty thinking underlying your analogy.
I don’t think it does. Buildings aren’t maintained by construction crews. They’re maintained by facilities teams, and maintenance contractors, the latter of which are hired on an as-needed basis rather than on permanent retainer.
It happens to be the case that software maintenance requires essentially the same skills as software implementation, so we don’t differentiate between the two jobs. And besides that, the nature of what people demand is different: nobody expects a single-family home to suddenly accommodate 50 families, but the equivalent of this is not exactly rare in the world of software.
The big difference is that if a competent plumber looks at a sink, it will take them 30 seconds to figure out. If a competent programmer looks at a new codebase with 30000 lines of code, it will take them 6 months to understand it, and then still be missing 80% of the details.
Yes, sure. For online services, that would be all the people involved with maintaining infrastructure. But my point is that construction workers are no longer needed for that particular building once it's completed. Yet, somehow, apps and websites are never completed. They're always changing for no good reason.
But there are all kinds of code-level changes that end up being necessary, even if you never want any new features. You can't just have sysadmins and expect to run a service over the Internet.
What kinds of changes? Operating systems are also feature-complete and don't need that yearly release cycle. They only need updating if there are new hardware capabilities that need to be exposed to applications. And security patches don't change APIs.
