It depends what he's doing. If his idea of SEO is just cleaning up his old code then yeah, I'd be a little miffed. A lot of the most important stuff for SEO (standards compliant code, relevant page titles, good URL names, etc.) are simply best practices that should always be followed. Beyond that, the most important things in SEO are really things that kind of have to happen organically. Good and relevant content, links from high quality sites, active social media, etc. are some of the keys to maintaining a good ranking.
Also remember that there are no guarantees and in fact some of the shadier practices can eventually hurt a page's ranking. I've heard of pages where they had text keywords in the code that were pushed way off the page so they weren't visible, the idea being that they could fill that with search terms that they didn't have to work into their actual content. That worked for a while but when Google modified their algorithm it actually punished that kind of behavior. It's the same with poor quality backlinking (i.e. where you pay to get a bunch of links from crappy sites); Google is increasingly viewing that kind of stuff as spam.
There are definitely some people who have made SEO expertise their bread and butter and are really good at it, but a lot of it is simply snake oil. Unfortunately it can be pretty difficult to know the difference. That said, if the page isn't coded for proper SEO it'd probably be in your best interest to get that fixed whether it's with the same guy or another developer.
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