Comment by t43562

I have often ended up working on the billing system - nobody cares if it functions and I don't know why. It pulls in the money every month and if it makes mistakes the company loses money.........!!!!.....

In the same companies people do care about the UI ...even when it has about 2-3 unique users per day. I won't explain how this translates to being able to function as a company at all - just to say it does because most selling is actually through salespeople.

So what I get from the OP's dose of "realism" is that everything is about perception and hopes for the future etc. The things that are making money now are assumed to be able to carry on doing so forever without attention. Just as some people buy a car and never look after it. When the day of disaster comes they're surprised.

Some companies implement new features to make a sale. So there's a continual struggle to complicate an already complicated system......but you're not allowed to refactor or spend time upgrading from gcc 4.3 or whatever because that's not work that leads to a sale. So each new feature takes more and more effort of course....and when you lose developers their replacements don't understand the convoluted codebase so bugs can't be fixed and customers don't renew their contracts.

So you do need to work for profitable companies rather than the kind of slow motion car-crash companies that are trying to do something which cannot really support itself.