Those things are not mutually exclusive. In a non-dysfunctional team, it is much easier to impress peers and managers if you have done useful work than if you h

Those things are not mutually exclusive. In a non-dysfunctional team, it is much easier to impress peers and managers if you have done useful work than if you haven't. The performative/visibility side has 2 aspects - first it should guide your choice of work towards the stuff that actually matters for people paying you to do work, or the nearest proxy (your manager, skip level, etc.), i.e. it should either map to some higher level objective directly or it should help other people/teams achieve theirs. Second is the cringy part, it does help have to make it visible unless it already is; or make it more visible. Let's say another team shipped some feature, but it was only viable because I've greatly improved the perf of their dependency as part of the project. It's not directly related to their feature, and kind of obscure to almost everyone involved, but I want to make sure I'm mentioned on the org-level ship email ;) Is it performative? Sure. But it's fair and follows useful work.