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.