[vvanders]

A good counter to this is having a strong technical IC leadership roles(I.E. Staff IC or similar) that leadership regularly gets input on in terms what is impactful in areas like this. The key piece is the work is low-visibility when successful and high visibility when it goes all wrong. A strong technical organization will recognize that and leverage high-judgement individuals close to the technical work so that they it can be accounted for properly.

Mekka talks about this in terms of underrepresented groups[1] but the same principals apply as well to any low-vis when successful / high-vis when it goes wrong(I.E IT, Ops, etc) roles. It's really up to technical leadership in an organization to make sure that they're noting high-impact/low-viz work and surfacing that in a way that the "new shiny" doesn't drown it out. I've been in both domains(high-vis graphics/shiny!, low-vis tooling/devx that had huge impact) and you really do need to account for it properly otherwise you'll have exactly the situation described in the article. Your company/org will falter and stumble as those infrastructure pieces slow everything down if you don't retain/reward the people doing that work.

[1] https://mekka-tech.com/posts/2018-08-09-the-difficulty-ancho...