> Your friend’s mistake is that he is too professional, doing the work that needs doing and pays everyone else’s salaries, while other more selfish people prioritise getting some more buzzwords on their CV.

Seconded - I've had this experience myself. I tried to be the "grownup in the room", ensuring that boring-but-important aspects of software development got taken care of. This was also my first experience on a "self-organizing" team.

The end result was that coworkers just kept doing whatever parts of the work they found personally gratifying, and at annual-review time their list of accomplishments was a lot glitzier than mine.

I continue to struggle with the anger and resentment I feel for how that all went down, and it's hard to objectively assess what I could/should have done differently without having behaved in the same (IMO) unprofessional manner as my then-teammates.

I'd worry working anywhere where being "conscientious" isn't appreciated. From another thread I've got it stuck in my head that there is "broccoli" and "ice cream" work - and yes, if everybody concludes that WP work is "broccoli", somebody needs to eat it, and for now it's the person who can eat it the fastest is going to get landed with it.. ..then ask them what their ice cream is and make sure they get some. And maybe most importantly, be up-front that it's broccoli and that nobody likes it - but it's important.

All managers see is that the work is getting done and no one is rocking the boat, they have zero incentive to look under the covers and see what’s really happening, then one day their unknown crucial engineer walks and they wonder why none of the self-promoting rockstars can do the bread-and-butter work, and what exactly those guys have been doing all this time.