Sometimes to make a project work you need all types of work, not only high visibility, high impact work that gets management attention and raises.
Good example is promo process at a particular large tech company - you win promo by picking a project that is high visiblity, appears difficult, standalone piece with "ownership". Maybe 25% of work that needs to be done meets this criteria.
It's hard to get promoted for "product excellence". They tried to do a push a few years ago, when I was there. You won't get promoted for fixing an issue that annoys millions of users or maintaining a succesfull product, unless you really build a case around that with data, case studies, etc. You would spend more than half of your effort on proving that your work is valuable.
If the product was successful even with the bug that annoyed millions of users, then have you really contributed anything by fixing it? Sometimes, the answer is yes, but I think it makes sense to require data to back that up. Similarly, data should be required for new products as well. Like great, you built this new system, but no one used it so you actually just wasted a bunch of time.
That's the tragedy of software development. Nobody wants to do work that isn't super visible (usually in the form of new features). Simplicity and robustness are not appreciated nor rewarded.
Good example is promo process at a particular large tech company - you win promo by picking a project that is high visiblity, appears difficult, standalone piece with "ownership". Maybe 25% of work that needs to be done meets this criteria.
It's hard to get promoted for "product excellence". They tried to do a push a few years ago, when I was there. You won't get promoted for fixing an issue that annoys millions of users or maintaining a succesfull product, unless you really build a case around that with data, case studies, etc. You would spend more than half of your effort on proving that your work is valuable.