This accords with my experience. I have a lousy academic publication record, partly because I wasn't that bothered about getting the next post-doc (although I was never short of offers, strangely enough) and partly because I liked to build things that facilitated research, which was a gap in our field of research which nobody seemed to have the time to fill. That isn't publication material, but it was a lot of fun and allowed me to investigate all sorts of interesting avenues.