[jcbozonier]

I agree. It's also important to remember that if those tickets didn't generate revenue and if they would never generate revenue no one would really want you to spend time on them.

Most businesses seem to use software as a set of automated business rules or as a service to clients and what the owner of such companies are looking at is profit. How much money did it cost for you to write software that made $X million? Honestly I think that's the only metric people really care about.

What about maintainability and the SOLID principles? That's a matter of by spending $N million on maintenance how many millions have we saved on future cost to implement profit driving features.

If what you are doing at your company doesn't somehow lead back to profit (even something as simple as "letting the devs do this keeps the good ones here") I guarantee no one will want you to do it. If you do it and it does drive some revenue, the question will be was the cost worth the reward.

The problem most companies have is it is very difficult to relate what each task a programmer works on to each dollar of revenue earned.