Shipping is only hard when you have to deal with all the loose ends "builders" leave lying around.

There is famous term for those: Tactical Tornados

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394287

From 2022. Funny that soon after that we figured out how to automate the Tactical Tornado programmer and collectively decided that they're the best thing ever and nobody needs other kinds of devs anymore.

To provide a different framing, I’m more of a builder and I’m happy to maintain too. What I’m not happy with, and have left jobs over, is being put into a box or becoming overly siloed.

Large companies tend to over specialize and that’s where I see the “I’m a builder” types fall apart. That takes away agency, lowers skills, and removes variety from work. That’s when it stops being fun to me.

I would hope most people with the builder architype are otherwise fine to keep building and maintaining.

Shippers gonna ship.