Years ago I worked at a company where I was passionate about the work I was doing. Did a lot of hours, worked in the evening... that sort of thing. The job was basically doing doing the work in lieu of a system to install software on bunches and bunches of hosts, being developed by a team of about 5-10 developers. When changes were pushed, we'd be asked to test if the installations would work -- but 9/10 times it never did. And because the devs were opinionated about ~ephemerality~, there were no logs for us to figure out what happened. So we would have to manually ssh into hosts and do the install. My team just gave up on the tool at some point -- nothing we ever said to the devs or management worked to prioritize making the damn thing work. Mind you, the linux-side installer itself was given to us by the vendor and packaged as .rpms and .debs and the devs were working on this for probably a year at that point.
Part of my job there was to add tests into ansible to make sure that the devs' installer could do what it was designed to do. But.. every time I tried to push anything, I would be given absolutely nonsense reasons for why my code wasn't acceptable. The worst instance was an ansible config getting rejected by a dev because I used bash in the ansible deploy code and that "not all clients' hosts will have bash" (in spite of a contractual requirement for bash to be installed). He insisted that I call /usr/bin/python instead. It was infuriating. I ended up writing my own automation that would install on an arbitrary set of hosts using the company's existing automation infrastructure just so that I wouldn't have to manually ssh into hosts or deal with the devs' nonsense. It worked well!
Anywho, the point. With the devs being asininely critical of my code, my boss eventually had a talk with me, saying that my performance wasn't great and that I wasn't pushing any code. I disagreed, but gave up, said fuck it, wrote four lines of "passable" ansible configs, then watched youtube for the rest of the week. At the end of the week, my boss told me that my performance was much, much better and that I should keep it up. So until I quit, I did as little work as I could.
Seriously.. sometimes it just really doesn't make sense to go above and beyond.
(Soon after, a major client complained that our packages weren't running on any of their hosts, right before a major event of theirs. The devs' automation just didn't work for AWS hosts, despite a large percent of our clients using it. So I wrote my own automation that just used selenium, which worked well enough to get things installed before the event. Afterwards, I was told that I had too much access, and that if I ever went to the press about the issues we had, that all of my coworkers would be fired once the client sued. Good times.)