Actually, notice of this type of things usually comes from your peers rather than the PHB's. There's nothing quite like being told by [another developer] that it was easy to make the modification to it.

True, but that often does not translate into more pay. I am not saying that personal satisfaction is not a good reward in itself, but on a large scale there is not a lot of financial incentive for programmers in general to write maintainable code in most shops I see.

(Hmmm. I don't remember that many "however's" in my text. It was fine when I proofread it. Aliens changed it! My foil hat is not working.)