From my experience which is obviously different than yours, over time these pats on the back do more to divide than unite development teams. Others know who get

From my experience which is obviously different than yours, over time these pats on the back do more to divide than unite development teams. Others know who gets stuff done and who doesn't just like you likely know who gets stuff done and who doesn't. The slack pats on the back seem counter productive, almost as if looking for credit for doing your job. The higher up in the organization you go the less important it becomes that you refactored the code to batch load index data where the prototype might have inserted one record at a time. By the time the index is done, the people who use it don't really care how long or how efficiently it was built.