Sorry, I’ve been doing your ‘extra’ for years. While it earns you kudos and respect, it rarely gets you promoted, if ever. Playing politics on the other hand is lot more successful.
Everyone knows damn well enough that internal politics can either make this story shine like a diamond, be pushed into a black morass, or everything in between. Internal politics supersedes all best practices in any country, market, or decade
Such a cop out response. "Politics" is interacting with your peers, your superiors, clients, vendors, etc. It's being able to articulate why your ideas are better from technical, organizational, and/or business perspectives. When you have ideas that shine in one of those categories but are absolute shit in the others, or when you have decent ideas but are terrible to work with, it's much easier to just get defensive and say that it's "politics" that made the "mediocre" (but better-suited) ideas rise to the top.
You don't (usually) get promoted for doing your job - no matter how well you do it. You get promoted when you doing the next rung up, but don't have the title yet. I learnt the hard way.
You're probably doing the wrong kind of "extra", which will just end in you being the only person who can do $CERTAIN_TASK, so you're always the person assigned to do $CERTAIN_TASK and therefore so essential that you can never be promoted to do something else.
