> If you choose to make it anyways, would you really expect them to reward you for it? A healthy organization should reward developers for making internal tool

> If you choose to make it anyways, would you really expect them to reward you for it? A healthy organization should reward developers for making internal tooling that is deemed necessary for the functioning of the org and drives value, yes. You're kinda ignoring the part here where I said that it was measurably useful to the company. If you're saying that you need to ignore necessary internal tools and get on the big visibility projects to get promoted, then thats exactly optimizing for self-promotion. Companies that ignore vital internal work that is not sexy and don't provide ways for engineers working on that vital internal work to advance their careers will end up unable to drive revenue due to low productivity.