Does Good Engineering Go Unnoticed?

Something I've been thinking about: a personality now making the rounds in YouTube podcasts, Bryce Case Jr. seems like a competent engineer, and it made me wonder about something broader in the engineering and security community.

If an engineer consistently does things correctly—follows good practices, prevents incidents, documents systems, and avoids outages—most people outside their organization may never know their name because nothing dramatic happens.

But if someone makes a highly visible mistake or is involved in a major incident, especially a possibly illegal incident, suddenly there are postmortems, conference talks, podcasts, interviews, and widespread discussion about what happened and what everyone can learn from it. Not always of course as I had a co-worker who facebook was going to send to prison for software he sold to some malicious actors that used it against facebook and all he got was a small blurb at the back page of a New Jersey local paper.

Do you think our industry has a visibility problem where successful prevention is largely invisible, while failure or unethical use of our craft can paradoxically create a public platform?

I'm curious how other engineers view this. How do we better recognize the people who quietly prevent disasters without encouraging a culture where only spectacular failures or someone who engages in a not-so-ethical act is the one who becomes memorable?

This may also speak to this relationship that society at large has with compute and network technology, it seems to be this intriguing sorcery and yet for you and me, the same command that we run to check for DNS resolution in troubleshooting a web application is the same command that someone else might use to engage in passive reconnaissance. Looking forward to the community's thoughts.