Not sure about that. There was a guy who knew his stuff and ran the build and version control system at my last job. You had to kiss his butt to get things done

Not sure about that. There was a guy who knew his stuff and ran the build and version control system at my last job. You had to kiss his butt to get things done (=pay karma), but I wouldn't call him nice. What it overemphasizes is jobs that benefit multiple people in visible ways. At my last job, I wrote code used by the internal QA team of 50 people that made their lives easier. I imagine that would earn a lot of karma. On the other hand, when I worked on a bug for an external customer, only my manager would care.