Programming is different from medicine. All the good programmers I know have learned their craft on the job. Silas doesn't have to wait and learn without getting paid, his current skill level is already in demand.

But that's tangential. More importantly, whenever I hear the word "maintainability" I feel like "uh oh, they wanna sell me some doctrinaire bullshit". Maintainability is one of those things everyone has a different idea of. In my opinion you should just try to solve each problem in the most natural manner, and maintainability will happen automatically.

Allow me to illustrate with an example. One of my recent projects was a user interface for IPTV set-top boxes. Lots and lots of stuff like "my account", "channels I've subscribed to", et cetera. Now, the natural way to solve this problem is to have a separate file (a "page") for each screen that the user sees, and ignore small amounts of code duplication between pages. If you get this right, it's pretty much irrelevant how crappily each individual page is coded, because it's only five friggin' kilobytes and a maintenance programmer will easily find and change any functionality they want. On the other hand, if you get this wrong... and it's really fucking distressing how many experienced programmers manage to get this wrong... making a Framework with a big Architecture that separates each page into small reusable chunks, perfectly Factored, with shiny and impeccable code... maintenance tasks become hell. And so it is with other kinds of projects too, in fact with most projects I've faced in my life. Focus on finding the stupid, straightforward, natural solution, and it will be maintainable with no effort.