30+ years in software engineering, ~20 in management, and I've never had difficulty keeping track of what people are doing. Can you elaborate your experience of environments where this isn't possible? It sounds like just the clusterf*ck companies?

I work in fintech, my experience is if you're operating this way you'll have an even harder time to get recognized.

I’m not sure it has to be one or the other extreme. Plenty of places have the “20% time” where you’re free to work in a self-directed way, learn about new stuff that interests you, etc. Maybe for this hypothetical Bob, that 20% is more like 50%, but it doesn’t mean that everything has to go totally wild west.

Right, this will probably solve OPs problem for sure.

They don't exist on a company-wide basis, but I've seen plenty of companies where engineers who are capable of setting their own tasks are allowed to do so. (As a sibling comment points out, this is very common in the stereotypical big tech companies, and in fact your promotions are typically based on the scope of things you can get done on your own initiative.)