Is it? Or is an employee's job to just do the work they're asked to do? "It depends" is, of course, the common answer, but in most places I've worked, "please

Is it? Or is an employee's job to just do the work they're asked to do? "It depends" is, of course, the common answer, but in most places I've worked, "please help find operational optimizations that can have a positive impact for the team, department or organization" has certainly never been an explicit ask. Ask team mates to change something to help on a project may fall under the same category, but usually the effect isn't felt beyond a project. My default mode when coming in to jobs is to try to get a 'full company' view, because I want to know how things work and how they might be made better. That approach is usually not met with much enthusiasm, and usually more with "that's not your job, you don't need to know that", etc. I took a daily import routine that was taking 25+ hours (meaning we couldn't show 'daily info' because it was out of date before finishing import) and got it down to 30 minutes. This was after having to fight/argue to see the data, and being told for a couple weeks "it can't be sped up, we'll have to buy faster hardware" ($8-$10k min, but they weren't looking at $15-20k IIRC). I spent a few hours over a weekend and got it down to 30 minutes, and saved the company minimum $8k. But I had to fight/argue to even do that ("that's not your job", "Charles is taking care of that", "the client will just have to deal with more delays while we upgrade", etc).