I came here to make this point ... engineering organizations applying scrum or agile make no allowance for something like this. And while you might dig deeper,

I came here to make this point ... engineering organizations applying scrum or agile make no allowance for something like this. And while you might dig deeper, find a problem that indeed would have been a major crisis, and in some cases get to add that as a Product support ticket, after the fact, if you're lucky, the reality is that a lot of times you'll spend a lot of time investigating, learn that much more about your infrastructure/codebase but find its a small (but not insignificant problem) that gets thrown on the backlog, while the PM seethes at you for screwing up team velocity, and going "rogue" (working on a problem without telling him). Or, maybe, even worse ... you don't find anything, now you just wasted a day on nothing. Of course you could say something in standup about it, but you and I both know you'd probably be gently admonished for wasting time on it and asked to go back to what you were doing. because ... sprint goals, quarterly objectives yada yada yada. If you make doing this enough of a habit, it might show up in your one on ones and evaluations even. There goes your big annual raise. In essence, you have to do your work AND go figure out these sorts of things on your own time. Thats how you find yourself putting in 50-60 hour weeks, but its okay because you're a "passionate" engineer. Either way The business wins.