Some pressure to ship and to work on the things your customers actually need keeps you honest. It's satisfying to work on things which make a short term difference to the bottom line because you know at least someone cares. In contrast to working on a speculative side project which may never see the light of day.
I've come to believe this is just a legitimate personality difference. I really struggle to find joy when I'm working on something that I question the usefulness of. But I've worked with many people who find the work itself joyful and don't mind that at all.
That's not my problem at all. I can't work on something I don't see as useful, that's the whole reason I started programming in the first place. But building useful things is not what most software companies are up to these days, far from it.
