This is down to company culture. I've worked in places that encouraged hard work by staying out of my way and giving me the tools I need to do the job, and I've

This is down to company culture. I've worked in places that encouraged hard work by staying out of my way and giving me the tools I need to do the job, and I've worked in places where breaking the curve isn't simply frowned upon, it is actively prevented with micromanaging and office politics. Specifically, I worked at the first type of company, which exited and sold my product to the second type of company. My product was credited with turning new company's profits around at an all hands meeting, but was shortly after critically crippled by a reduction in hardware by the IT dept. The product manager sided with them. They took away 50% of my database cores and disk space and told me to figure it out. The next two years were spent "optimizing" around the fact that they crippled the product at the hardware level, and sales of the product stagnated. It hasn't grown since. It can't, it doesn't have the hardware necessary to grow any larger than it is now. So there's nothing to do but free up disk space every so often by reindexing tables so it doesn't collapse entirely. No features or bug fixes will ever make it grow larger. They want to grow a tree in a flower pot.