[counterpoint1]

Focus on being "good at your job" not at "making everything better" or whatever you're doing now.

What you think of as doing extra work also ends up causing extra work for other people. You say "Attemtps to communicate with other teams to sync and improve processes were also shutdown... because it's not my responsibility and the team leads felt threatened" - it's almost certainly not that your team lead "felt threatened" (wtf?) but because you caused an extra hassle for them by causing confusion among your coworkers about the processes and practices for communication, documentation or decision-making.

Your time spent "fixing a lot of small things" that nobody cares about means other people have to code review, QA test, merge, deploy etc your work, which as you stated, was not scheduled/prioritized/desired.

An important part of being a team is playing your role, which includes not interfering with other people doing theirs. You see yourself as an unappreciated hero picking up the slack for everyone else, but everyone else sees you as an unpredictable wildcard causing confusion and extra work. Just focus on doing your job well and let the whole team thrive.

[throwawayzza]

> What you think of as doing extra work also ends up causing extra work for other people

This is a very good point but none of the things you mentioned are happening to other people (code review, QA, merge, deploy). Maybe that clarifies the kind of environment I'm working with.

In any case, I understand that even if more work is not being done, more stress is being caused because people just assume things will break in unimaginable ways. I can appreciate how that would be a problem for others.

> everyone else sees you as an unpredictable wildcard causing confusion and extra work

Thanks for the harsh truth. Would you say the kind of work I'm doing has a place in any other type of company? Or at all?