There's a concept of "visible productivity", where you do good work but also make it visible. I learned pretty early in my career that merely doing good work is

There's a concept of "visible productivity", where you do good work but also make it visible. I learned pretty early in my career that merely doing good work is not enough; it's not that someone else will take credit, it's that few people will notice, especially outside your immediate area. Features are much easier to make visible, but it's not universal... a long time ago my manager told me to shift the perspective on some crappy boring perf work I did by multiplying milliseconds saved by runs per day and converting CPU time into dollar cost in the datacenter ;) IIRC I literally put the dollar figure into my perf review. A semi-related point w.r.t. visibility/popularity, is that your team is much more likely to be continuously aware, and depend on, your work; whereas controlling for levels/etc. each person's opinion of you counts roughly the same, and in fact that of the people from other teams may matter more because working across teams is perceived as a sign of seniority. So, doing awesome job when you work with other teams is much more important as far as your "popularity" goes.