I guess it's dangerous to use words like "nobody" or "everyone" or "always" or "never" on the overly pedantic Hacker News. I would hope that the sentiment of my point came across either way. If not, let me clarify: it's generally preferred to spend engineering effort on building new features and optimizing code to improve performance etc. over e.g. rewriting code from scratch to simplify it's maintenance. I would venture to guess that an overwhelming amount of engineering effort is spent on effectively adding complexity to code.
Whoever is able to demonstrate the value of a sequence of work to the business will get their work prioritized. Product’s job is to shape and predict the value of adding new features. Customer complaints about slow reports help Customer Support justify performance optimizations.
If engineers want the business to pay them for simplifying maintenance, they can identify a collection of support tickets that have a compelling root cause, and propose refactoring that system to eliminate the bugs and maintenance issues.
What I usually see is us engineers calling it “tech debt” and complaining we never take time for it, which is about as effective as the bookkeeper complaining about the paperwork that debt payments create for him. Businesses love debt. It’s a useful financial tool. The business doesn’t get the issue.
