I've done a lot of maintenance programming, and I think it's a horrible way to start and a difficult rut to get out of. Fixing someone else's bugs all day is demoralizing and creates all kinds of cognitive dissonance about whether or not you actually hate programming. Write your own code and learn from your own bugs. If you have to, get a non-programming day job and write code on the side. At least that's what I would do if I were starting over.

Why is it a difficult rut to get out of? Because when people build teams to build systems from scratch, they look for other people who have built things from scratch. Then when they need someone to maintain it, they look for someone who has maintained other piles of buggy crap.