I expect that most software developers don't spend most of their time designing beautiful, elegant solutions to interesting problems; they spend their time blundering around in an over-complicated and poorly designed code-base using tools that barely work and trying not to trip over myriad corner cases or buried in technical debt.
But oh man, when you actually do write that one function that does the cool thing in a neat way and fits into the other crap you're wading around in without breaking anything in a way that makes intuitive sense... man, does that feel nice.
Putting one more bag of trash on the trash pile without the whole trash pile falling over is a satisfying feeling for sure.
And sometimes when it comes to this I feel bad and somewhat guilty. But I can't restructure the whole trash pile and orders and budget constraints and all that, so it just has to keep growing and we shore it up where we can until it starts collapsing around the base and then maybe we can admit it was a trash pile all along and try to do better next time.
But oh man, when you actually do write that one function that does the cool thing in a neat way and fits into the other crap you're wading around in without breaking anything in a way that makes intuitive sense... man, does that feel nice.