That's pretty much what I was thinking while reading it. The difference between doing your work, and doing your work better than you're expected, is often unrewarded with any measurable security, probably because they're non-functional requirements and it's hard for some manager to sell their boss on the RoI. It's similarly hard to measure, if they'd even let you in on that data, how much of a minor influence you had on the business financially. Sales people meanwhile can just say "I sold this company on a $2m contract for services over the next 2 years"