At a startup, there's a good chance Fred's time would be better spent knocking out feature work (you only have so much runway, after all). But at a mature tech

At a startup, there's a good chance Fred's time would be better spent knocking out feature work (you only have so much runway, after all). But at a mature tech company, assuming he's good at his job, Fred is likely providing a ton of value by - Keeping his coworkers sane (barely functional codebases that are difficult to work with have a way of killing morale) - Having an intimate knowledge of the code base that can inform future feature work - Paying down tech debt that's generally uninteresting to more feature-oriented coworkers Having a whole team of Freds is probably not a good idea, but having one in a senior engineer or tech lead role is really useful.