The better way to think about it is that you want to be close to the money. If you can quantify your contribution easily (I was the lead on product X that was a

The better way to think about it is that you want to be close to the money. If you can quantify your contribution easily (I was the lead on product X that was a huge success/ brought in $Y additional revenue) you have little trouble getting some share of that success. If you can't (I fixed the tests so that they're no longer flaky and improved the overall product quality), then generally it's a lot harder to get the deserved recognition, even if your impact was actually larger! The trick is to go back to money, when you can (be specific, "build machines are costing us $X/Mo, people used to rebuild three times on average to get a "green status" so just by that I saved 0.66*$X/Mo; add an estimated y% of developer time; add cost of extra incidents/ support tickets if you can quatify it; and all of the sudden you can reasonably claim a larget $ amound that much more will easily get the attention of a high-level manager).