The truth is that what you actually do at work doesn’t really matter. The important thing is how your work is perceived and that is a function of how well you are liked which itself correlated with common background, cultural similarity and essentially innate quality of trustworthiness (there’s research on this).

Let me give you an example of how this can play out. Say you do the dirty work no one wants to do. These are are all possible outcomes:

- you get stuck with that and it becomes expected of you

- people feel that area still sucks so you didn’t have a lot of impact

- people really value your impact

- you’re viewed as having initiative and tackling hard problems

- you’re viewed as not tracking org priorities and instead doing work nobody cares about

- you get more opportunity to work in high profile projects because of your efforts

- you get less opportunities because you’re too essential in your dirty work

- you get less opportunities because you’re viewed as not working in what’s high impact

- you will get no credit for avoiding a catastrophic failure that didn’t happen. Worse, people may wonder what you’ve been doing (y2k anyone?)

All of these narratives can be constructed from the same set of facts. Part of this relies on your ability to communicate. A bigger part is networking. But the biggest factor of all is whether or not they like you.

EDIT: fixes as per comments below. Thanks!