[galistoca]

From my experience in a lot of cases this is the manager's fault or the system's fault, especially if the guy was initially enthusiastic. Here's an example: On my first day at work, I found some UX issue with our existing system and fixed and pushed the code. I told the manager what I did and he said "well this is not in the sprint, so why don't you roll it back?" That was my first commit and I rolled it back. Also I realized working too hard didn't do me any good. In the first couple of months I was super productive and just kept pushing out code, but nobody really cared and if anything I was being penalized for it because the more I commit the higher the chance that something will reopen, and I get even more workload--all without being much appreciated. Anyway stuff like this happened too much. After a while I started not caring at all and learned to become that guy you describe.

[enraged_camel]

>>I told the manager what I did and he said "well this is not in the sprint, so why don't you roll it back?"

I hate managers who punish initiative-takers. I hope he got fired.

[galistoca]

Actually, no. He's been promoted to higher position now. This is another thing that made me disillusioned. At larger companies it's all about politics

[chris_wot]

Perhaps though it might be best to roll it back but keep it in a private branch for later?

[ultrasaurus]

Boring manager PoV here: I love initiative, but bring it up in standup to minimize surprise. Sometimes one step forward conflicts with another 10 steps forward on another story.

On our team we have a bunch of fun stories with lower RoI at the top of our ready backlog, that may never get pulled into the sprint, but are there if we eat all our vegetables (e..g code reviews) and get the Sprint goal done early.

[galistoca]

OK here's the situation: I was a new hire and the manager never assigned me any story for quite some time. Which means I had nothing to do with a "sprint goal". Of course it would be a weird thing if I have other tasks assigned but work on some unrelated minor issue instead of things I need to do for the sprint, I don't do that. But at the time I was literally idling away because I was never assigned anything. Leaving a new hire to do nothing for two weeks is a bad enough management. It's even worse when the new hire gets frustrated doing nothing and just fixes something that's obviously broken and is clearly something that doesn't conflict with other "10 steps forward". I forgot exactly what it was but imagine something like fixing a broken css. And I was made to revert it because it was not in the sprint. Anyway the point is not this singled incident. I mentioned how things like this happened all the time, making me care less and less over time.