This can also work the other way, you can be the person doing the unique difficult stuff that nobody else on the team can do and be not recognized.

Being recognized by management as contributing is more a social issue than anything else. I feel that you implicitly recognize this when you characterize work as "'cool' stuff that is seen as difficult" - the perception is more important than the work or productivity.

A modicum of time spent communicating what you have gotten done can pay dividends. A lesson I need to remember from time to time.

On that note, I had a year where besides doing (and finishing) a bunch of decent size projects that I thought my manager was going to highlight, I spent like a day or two optimizing some daily batch process. All I did in the end was change one line of code to enable batched inserts, which brought the finish time from later afternoon to early AM hours. Come yearly review time, one of the bullets high up on what the manager wrote was that particular speedup, which surprised me given it was done just in passing and I forgot all about it.

I guess you really never can tell what the other side is thinking. But at the same time, in hindsight this was predictable since it impacted a bunch of high-visibility reports and the manager probably got feedback from upstairs.

As a corporately smart man once told me: Your job is to make your manager happy.

This has more to do with making their life easier and giving them bragging rights, than it does with anything else. If you can make your manager look good in front of their manager, then good things will happen to you.

I'm one of the only people who can code where I work. Nobody understands or cares at all what it is that I do. Their eyes glaze over if I try to tell them.

There was one time that stands out where everybody expressed gratitude for my hard work and asked if they could help me out. It was when I spent a week running cables and setting up PCs for our incoming batch of interns.

I know that programming is much more challenging than crawling under desks and plugging things in, but none of them ever really saw the programming. All of that crawling, though--I looked like such a hard worker that week.

Do you take vacations? It's important to demonstrate what happens when you're not around.

It's likely they won't notice anything at all if he is doing a good job. That's the other issue: not only the product of programming is not easy to see but consequences of good or bad practices do not become visible before the author is long gone and forgotten. Sometime doing IT feels like delivering medicine.