1) Cleaning up code adds 0 value to the customer today. It may add value for the customer down the road, but see #3
2) Most engineers underestimate the time & effort to clean up code without altering it's behavior, and any alteration of its behavior is almost certain to introduce regressions and/or bugs
3) If you knew for certain that your code was still going to be used and hacked on 5-10 years from now, then it would probably be a net positive, but you can't predict that. If you think you can predict that, you're wrong.
Comments
I disagree with this article for several reasons:
1) Cleaning up code adds 0 value to the customer today. It may add value for the customer down the road, but see #3
2) Most engineers underestimate the time & effort to clean up code without altering it's behavior, and any alteration of its behavior is almost certain to introduce regressions and/or bugs
3) If you knew for certain that your code was still going to be used and hacked on 5-10 years from now, then it would probably be a net positive, but you can't predict that. If you think you can predict that, you're wrong.