Comment by GMoromisato

I totally agree with you.

The trick is that:

1. Sometimes we don't know what is most valuable (from the company's perspective).

2. It is easy to convince ourselves that whatever we want to do is really the most valuable thing (e.g., "Refactoring this massive subsystem will help the company in the long-term" or "Introducing this new technology (that I really like) will make it easier to recruit talent.")