Except if you have some leverage like an offer from another company, then sometimes you can make your current employer to almost match the offer. Once I improve

Except if you have some leverage like an offer from another company, then sometimes you can make your current employer to almost match the offer. Once I improved some workflow greatly because I took extra time for it (it was about some Lua debugging, I don't really remember the circumstances), I was told that this is part of my job, so no raise. Now I don't expect raises for things like that but I only invest extra time if an issue annoys me and even then I open a ticket first. Long build times are annoying.