It's not that maintenance has no marketplace value, but that it's only really valuable when the system is on fire. I've optimized that kind of SQL statement, a

It's not that maintenance has no marketplace value, but that it's only really valuable when the system is on fire. I've optimized that kind of SQL statement, and it paid really well, but only because it was at a point where it was causing a whole lot of pain, so the fix provided CEO-visible relief. What is not a great use of your time is to preemptively fix issues like this, unless it's somewhere so system critical that engineering effort is going to be rewarded regardless. But even then, you might want to do something in a way that is easy to sell later in your career. You want to at least be able to say: Remember how <famous architect> sold his innovative system at <famous conference>, and HN wonder why this talk existed, as there's no way this solution could scale? Well, they were right, it didn't scale, and I was the one that replaced it with something good, piece by piece, without anything falling down. And that's the reason you don't get a lot of high quality maintenance work happening at most places. The vast majority of systems in the world are just not worth the engineering effort to build very well. And even in companies that can afford to do this kind of work, you will see a lot of effort spent shuffling engineers across projects, as a team that has high visibility tasks in a quarter might not have any the next.