Right, but they also have to incentivize people to work on the non-sexy infrastructure pieces.
I don't see how "work on whatever you want" can get the maintenance jobs done when everyone would rather be writing new code than maintaining old stuff.
I find that perfecting what some would call "non-sexy infrastructure pieces" very rewarding. In fact, it's what I spend most of my day doing! Only to me, all of our infrastructure pieces are sexy. Because I wrote and open sourced a lot of them, I want them to succeed because by doing so, they create a stable site (and I get fewer pages at 2am). If you are a software craftsman, then maintenance isn't really "maintenance." It's finding logic and design flaws and finding ways to erase those rough edges. In the end, you work towards a perfect vision of your software, just as a sculptor works toward his perfect vision of slab of marble.
Agreed! The best part about "non-sexy" code is that with a little love and attention, you get to make it sexy. :) Sure, the minute details in the back end aren't the public-facing front end that the users look at and go "wow" but there's the feeling of knowing that it's those little details that tie it all together and make it work smoothly. Improving on that can be very rewarding, indeed.
I don't see how "work on whatever you want" can get the maintenance jobs done when everyone would rather be writing new code than maintaining old stuff.