You're asking for feature bloat. If the only way of winning is getting new stuff done, new stuff will be done regardless of the benefit or cost to the company.
Yes, it is in fact the case that getting new stuff done is the only way to benefit the company. But new stuff != feature bloat. There's lots of new stuff that can be totally invisible to end users, and is deeply valuable.
Treading water should not get you promoted. That doesn't make sense.
>it is in fact the case that getting new stuff done is the only way to benefit the company
I spent a few weeks just refactoring 6k lines of code into +- 300 lines on my current job.
If my company was run by you, the best course for me woould have been leaving that mess around. Which would have led to either the same refactoring under far more stressful time constraints, or even more shit code by applying a band-aid into the old code (this code makes us some serious money, and an unexpected third party change would have broken it in such a way that would be seriously hard to fix with the old code).
Also, there are loads of features that were far easier to implement after the refactoring.
Maintenance job isn't coasting around. It has a multiplicative effect on anyone who works in the system. It needs to be done, if you want the org to not slow down to a snail pace - and when someone leaves a mess, it isn't even neccessarily easier than pumping new features since you have to figure out all observable behaviours from messy stuff.
If there's no incentive to getting your hands dirty, no one will want to get their hands dirty. People will fight to not do neccessary jobs if the only way of advancing their career is avoiding those jobs.
> Also, there are loads of features that were far easier to implement after the refactoring.
Congratulations, you have demonstrated the value and made it easier to do something. As someone who has gotten promoted 2 times (and soon to be 3) primarily off of tech debt reduction and infrastructural improvements that don't themselves do anything, but drive future productivity, of course I think this is valuable. This kind of thing is literally the only work I do.
Now yes, there's a point beyond which only doing that work won't get you promoted, but that point is L5 where you're making 350K/year, and you can continue to do some of that work and get promoted further, you just likely have to
1. Get other people to also do that work
2. Do other work that acts at a larger scale
If you're actively adding new features to a service, you aren't doing maintenance. You're launching new things, and people get promoted by launching new things all the time. And people get promoted for making it easier to launch to features all the time.
No, they're perfectly compatible, you're just choosing to take an extreme interpretation of the first.
Like there is always groundwork that has to be done as part of the new thing, and doing that work is part of getting new stuff done. If getting new stuff done is the end goal, "getting new stuff done 5% faster" will obviously get new stuff done (and benefit the company).
You're asking for feature bloat. If the only way of winning is getting new stuff done, new stuff will be done regardless of the benefit or cost to the company.
That does sound like Google alright, though.