Same here. I am also stupid in another way - I can't boast of my "incredible" accomplishments by sending out huge and beautiful emails to prove my "impact". With that kind of combination, I am looking forward to stagnation at my current level.
If you're not good a marketing a product, you should still spend 100% of your effort on making it great, and hire a marketing person to do the other part.
When your head is down in an interesting, thorny problem, it is easy to forget how those other folks are affected by your work, and it's easy to lose appreciation for the fact that their head is filled with a completely different information set. So it can be very useful to spend 5% of your time on this.
Or heck, just try 2.5% - one hour out of a standard work week. Personal anecdote: I wrote up a little thing about why customers would pick one video encoder over another, and marketing just did backflips and started asking my manager if I could write more things.
At that point, it's really your and your manager's (and so forth) responsibility to ensure your product or tool is in the right hands and helps people.
My manager was great at taking on some of the burdens and shielding me from above, while still giving me the flexibility and incentive to work with other teams and people to make sure I was the one everyone recognized for the work done, as opposed to the team or him.
In either case, at some point you have to convince someone else that it's worth investing their time. External, this can be dollars (although is that really the best way?). Internally (and optimally), you still need to self-market your product to marketers.
Either way, it's better to spend at least a little time doing marketing. Boiled down from all the hype and jargon, marketing is highlighting the benefits to another person. If an IC is working on a project where they don't know the benefits, there is a larger issue.
You can't hire a marketing person for yourself. Marketing yourself and your work is important because things don't magically get discovered or recognized.
Focusing on your own silo and blaming others for the team's failure results in dysfunction, not success. Instead, take ownership of your job and (shared) ownership of the other jobs that interact with it.
There are a lot of medium-small employers in lesser-known or unsexy domains that under normal circumstances struggle to compete with FAANG/similar to find people. How many are hiring right now I don't know, but it might be an option.
Granted my role is very crossfunctional, but I think it's pretty unusual to be consistently impactful working in your own silo. So boosting my collaborators gets me the visibility benefits, without feeling insincere, and contributes to a work culture that is collaborative and supportive.
For context, I lead an analytics team at a FAANG company.
What if you're consistently doing good work but have zero visibility? Then years down the road, you notice a trend of people around you getting promotions/raises/bounses more often than you? The same people that slack off & lack integrity; to name a few. As a human being with emotions... can you honestly say you won't feel resentful in your moment of realization?
I am asking as someone who's been in that situation more times than I care to admit... I do good work for myself and for the sake of doing good work; I take pride in the work I do... but as most of it was never communicated, no one knew about it and just took it's results for granted; I was bypassed for raises, promotions, etc... Was it worth it? I can't give you a answer... it's a very conflicting place to be.
I think people have an obligation to share the work they do, especially if it's interesting or impactful. Because if you don't, then generally no one else will.