Many don't because that type of work doesn't directly and obviously drive revenue, doesn't have slick customer-facing UX, and isn't on the radar of product or management. For every shop that actually has their act together there are two that fall into this trap; from what I gather consulting and contracting places in particular are quite prone to this line of thinking since the distinction between billable and non-billable work underscores this further and leads to especially perverse incentive structures.

Yet in so many consulting firms people are just twiddling their thumbs without any work.

Developers who make the lives of their peers at work easier are well-liked.

The people who decide your paychecks typically don't understand what you're doing anyways, so I wouldn't worry about that.

Sometimes.

If you make a tool that has been in use for years - long enough that engineers who turned to management are now in senior management position remember using and liking it back int the day - then you can get a good paycheck to maintain it. Of course this assumes that the tool is still relevant 25 years from when you first created it. Note that this is about you creating and maintaining the tool, taking over someone else's tool might work, but is probably seen as a job for a junior developer.

In some cases you can wait for things to get really bad and then be rewarded for saving the day. (I strong oppose this - a good engineer should see problems and fix them before they get that bad)

You can spend 10% of your time maintaining tools so long as the other 90% has great value. Great value means you see the market need and develop the first prototype that demonstrates the idea works (then turn this over to a new team to make production worthy while you go on to invent something else).

You can run numbers to prove that your tool makes a difference. (Some at Facebook can show hundreds of thousands of dollars saved as a result of their tools)

There are probably others - but none are easy to get into.

> Does your company offer fat paychecks for improving internal tooling?

It does. But not to me. There are entire teams with millions of dollars of budget to improve tooling.

But of course they only do what they like. And my management doesn't care enough to bring our complaints to them. Individual engineer complaints are ignored.