There was a data ingestion job which inserted 4 million keys into Redis. It was awfully slow. I sped it up a lot using the Redis protocol format and redis-cli --pipe. They praised me for that.

There was a dashboard which queried data from a MongoDB collection and calculated some counts. I changed the design so that the service itself would update the counts so as to avoid costly queries.

I brought down build and deploy times for a service by removing unused gradle dependencies, structuring the build to allow using parallel builds and removing unnecessary configuration generation using templates and the entire team was glad that I solved a major pain for them.

Sorry you had a bad experience but I think this is what we mean when we say company culture.