I don't remember the article but I remember reading about a building management game where the reviewer believed the entire game was based around the elevator management code and that writing that code was fun for the programmer but the game itself was not fun for the player.
It looks like this highlights the "fun for the programmer" part.
As aidenn0 said, this sounds like SimTower and its sequel Yoot Tower. There's a section of the manual[1] called "A Message From Yoot Saito, Creator of Sim Tower" that describes how he started creating it because he was curious about elevator programming.
Sim Tower and Sim Ant were both great network-building games. They seemed boring until you really delved into the details. Maxis was really genius up until EA bought them. Here's a pretty cool project they did that never came to light...
It looks like this highlights the "fun for the programmer" part.