alt Hacker News> Nobody ever complains about the person who’s leaving everything they touch a little cleaner than how they found it.
This should be true, but it's not in my experience. Even small, clear improvements are rejected as off-mission or shunted to a backlog to be forgotten. Like, "cool, but let's hold off on merging this until we can be certain it's safe", or in other words "this is more work for me and I'd really rather not".
Do it as part of ticket work you're already doing. There is always a way to leave things better than how you found them.
I have worked across a wide gamut of roles (full-stack eng, infosec, deploy infra, devops, infra eng, sysadmin), companies (big and small, startups and huge multibillion-dollar players), and industries (finance, datacenters, security products, gaming, logistics, manufacturing, AI) over a thirty year career and I have never felt the level of helplessness that people seem to be claiming. Some places have been easier, some have been harder, but I have never once found it to be as difficult or impossible as everyone laments is the case.