[mytailorisrich]

If you're arguing that you might get paid as a contractor to refactor some code therefore refactoring is a productive activity for a business point of view then you have completely missed the point.

Edit:

I'm not arguing that refactoring isn't necessary or important. It is. But it should be kept to a minimum because it really is a pure cost and does not deliver anything of value to end users.

Your customers are the engineering teams of software business. They sometimes need to refactor their code. But their business would prefer they didn't because that's money spent on something invisible to end users (the end customers).

[onion2k]

I'm not arguing that at all. I'm saying that all parts of the development process are important and each part adds to what you can charge for and how much you can charge. If you're good at writing software and understand how to create a maintainable, robust, well tested code base then you can get paid for things like refactoring, documentation, testing, etc. Clients understand that writing software is more than just delivering features.

Specifically in my own case, the company I work for writes software for (mostly) software product companies. When we plan what to do in a sprint 'refactoring' is part of that. We literally charge for the time we spend doing it. How long we spend refactoring is agreed by the customer's project / product manager. They understand why it's necessary and important, and they want us to do it.