I think the issue is more at many places people don't feel empowered to just go and fix/build something. I've worked places where if I pull stuff in from the ne

I think the issue is more at many places people don't feel empowered to just go and fix/build something. I've worked places where if I pull stuff in from the next sprint my manager gets annoyed because it screws with the metrics being reported, and where if I were to start any projects started on my own initiative and it was noticed I'd be reprimanded or at best be given busy work instead (some fuzzy bullshit task which I'd hate). Because of this whenever I had down time I'd goof off instead of say, writing optimizations to our parser which was slowing down a big data ingestion process. I literally did start doing that once when I had nothing on and I basically told "yeah it's not worth your time because it isn't billable". Of course later clients complained it was slow and I was told to look for optimizations (but not to that part, because that part was complicated, even though that part was the slowest part and I had already half implemented something).