I've done maintenance and didn't even have to wow anyone to get satisfaction.

There's something deeply satisfying to me in cutting out thousands of lines of code and no-one even noticing.

I will even go back and look at that commit over the next few weeks with a feeling of peace and accomplishment.

I've sometimes 'stolen' time from feature work to do that refactoring, and it's the massive reduction of complexity and TLOC that often gives me satisfaction, not delivering the feature.

Don't get me wrong, I've delivered features and applications I'm proud and happy with too, but I think there's a significant minority of us who really enjoy deleting tons of bad code too.

Yeah, maybe agency. I don't know. It helps that I'm fairly social for an introverted engineer. One of the biggest systems change I ever made was related to a legacy url that the main page had to use. It seems like the type of thing that should be simple to make, but due to the sheer amounts of redirects and multiple systems involved it was really painful to change the primary domain. Only like 2 people in the company had any idea the amount of effort necessary to avoid breaking countless things. But when I finally flipped the switch I spent the entire afternoon running around the company and showing random people I knew in other departments the home page. I got a lot of "huh?"s. literally no one was impressed. But, I can have an infectious enthusiasm, so as I pointed to the URL, and said "look! that was actually really hard to do", people would at least come around and say "ok? good job?". They still weren't particularly impressed, but they at least understood it wasn't trivial. Couple this with a good PM who I knew was also evangelizing some of this stuff, and you can get a lot of agency over time in an org.

So maybe the trick is evangelizing? I really don't know, I just know I've been successful, often in spite of the organization I was in. I'm also constantly aware of the amount of luck involved in everything I do, so it's always hard for me to believe that I was the important factor.

It's probably company attitude towards agency as well - my time is tracked and recorded against client budgets and tasks. I can't spend an afternoon tinkering if it's not based upon a client's requirement.