I don’t think your point disagrees with my point. The better aligned your perception is with management on where/how value is getting delivered, the better you will judge how to invest your time. You might be right and they might be wrong. But if you know the business better than your bosses, then you might be working for the wrong people.
And I think you're missing my point. If everyone is perfectly aligned and recognised what will be rewarded, no-one wants to do any other task.
I work in finance. We have a lot of regulatory requirements. Assume some boring regulatory requirement comes in that all of your agorithmic trading on electronic venues needs to stamp an algorithm id on each message to the venue (this was a real thing). Someone has to do a huge amount of boring work aligning everything to do this, and in the end, there is little visible value creation from this work, and you're not going to be rewarded for doing it (people weren't). But without it, your business will cease to function entirely.
The problem is the stakeholders controlling reward are far from perfect. They will judge this project against a project that tweaked the algorithms for better performance (as I already alluded to) and reward the latter, because it made dollar sign go up.
So basically you end up in a shark tank where developers are acting selfishly, desperately trying to get their name attached to the correct projects, and the loudest voices win.
The value of a quiet, but excellent developer, who writes correct code, doesn't introduce stupid complexity, makes the right decisions for the future, even if it takes longer, is very high. But that value isn't easily visible and I'd argue this is rife across the every industry that employs developers, not just big finance.
I think your assumption that everyone gets to select the tasks they want to work on is probably inaccurate for most organizations. Any reasonable manager will ensure that important but unglamorous work is getting done. They might assign this work fairly or not. It probably depends on the org.
I was speaking to how a developer should try to maximize their career potential and income.
You are assigning a personal value on several factors (simplicity, functional correctness, future maintainability) that may or not be shared by an organization.
My stance is, unless you have equity, it’s not your company. Deliver what your company wants. If they’re not smart enough to figure out what’s right for their business, find somewhere else or start a competitor.
My implication is that if you think the company doesn't understand the business value of something you think is valuable, you should try to see it from their perspective or at least verify your assumptions. Most of the time they are right.
