Classic: You get what you measure.

But years ago the same thing happened to me at Apple. I was fixing bugs in every part of a major framework to help SnowLeopard ship only to get passed over for a minor promotion because I wasn't "critical on any one project".

I thought it was especially ironic since SnowLeopard was supposed to be a stability/performance release only to get massively delayed by people "shipping" things like the Objective-C garbage collection that made XCode unusable for months. The same stability/performance release that had a day-1 point release.