[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.