Agreed. I love cleaning out warts, fixing broken APIs and removing unneeded code. I love looking at the output at "git diff --staged" seeing lots and lots of red and very little green.
But that's just me - any maybe other developers in my team. For everybody else - marketing, sales, customers, end users - this is completely irrelevant. Nobody really understands this kind of work, much less actually sees a value in it.
Adding a blinking logo somewhere and you're the hero of the day. Exchanging 500 lines of bad spaghetti with 20 lines of beautiful art and you're wasting everybody's time.
But because I love this kind of work so much, I don't care. I'm in a position where I can do such things for fun an pleasure, so I'm doing them.
I like it, because I seem to have a knack for it and mostly because I enjoy working on things that no one else wants to touch. It's nice to have a degree of autonomy and not have to deal with working on a big team, even if it means not getting to work on new things.
But that's just me - any maybe other developers in my team. For everybody else - marketing, sales, customers, end users - this is completely irrelevant. Nobody really understands this kind of work, much less actually sees a value in it.
Adding a blinking logo somewhere and you're the hero of the day. Exchanging 500 lines of bad spaghetti with 20 lines of beautiful art and you're wasting everybody's time.
But because I love this kind of work so much, I don't care. I'm in a position where I can do such things for fun an pleasure, so I'm doing them.