Is it common to be under appreciated by your company, even if you are doing good?

Extremely.

Yup.

They start appreciating you when they realise just how much it'll cost them to replace you.

@C0D4 Yep!

The best thing you can do for your career is look for a better job.

What's the risk?
Your boss finds out you're looking to replace him/her and fires you out of spite. You're out your salary.

What's the possible reward?
You find a better job offer and a) take it, b) negotiate a better offer with your current employer, c) start a bidding war and go with whoever wins, or d) you stay at your current job like an idiot. or you can't find anything, and you're not out anything.

Say you make $50k/year. If things go poorly, you could be out $50k/year. But if things go well, you could increase your salary (and/or job/office quality) by 50%, 100%, even 200% -- up to whatever someone wants to pay you. The sky's the limit. So you can be out $50k, or you can increase your salary/etc. up to infinity. All for pretty negligible risk.

So @everyone: why don't you?

@Root
Ulterior motives are the only valid reason. My current main client is super shitty, but also inept at contracts. They signed a contract where we own all the code we write, so I'm not planning on bailing until they've finished funding the last 2 products we're releasing to market. I look at it as a decent trade to delay my series A.

Also why I devrant. Even if it's not ideal to leave just yet, I'm not just going to sit around and not acknowledge how coprophragiacally stupid they are.

Edit: also the pleasure of dropping dime on their imported labor exploitation and employment representation practices on the way out the door. That day will be magical.

I was in it/support at my old job. In whatever time I could scrounge between calls I learned programming, automated a shitton of processes and wrote a big automation towards the end, literally saving 10 times my salary in work hours each month (and that's the conservative estimate). So I delivered that last summer and then in the fall got hit with budget cuts - they wanted to move all developments back to main branch to make it more efficient (right...).
Anyway I got a real dev job and a 33% raise to go with it, and when they called last week asking about that big project it felt real good just shrugging and saying I can't help unless you accept I'll be sending a bill for my time :-p