[letientai299]

_Often my biggest contribution isn’t being the only one who is able to fix something, but being the only one who realises something is fixable._

I feel relatable. At all the placed I've worked, people realize the problem, sometime find the solution, but most of the time, they won't fix it, unless it directly affect their code/project/product. As a result, technical debt keeps bubble up and we have more and more issues.

Right now, the only thing I can do is just to keep fixing issues as I encounter them. But that's for the code, I don't have any solution for the "people" problem.

[xorcist]

I call this the person with taste. One of the first questions I try to answer in new setting is to identity the person "with taste" around. They are usually a good entry point if you want to get something done.

[nicbou]

Many problems lack a Designated Person Who Cares. Everyone has something to do, a task to accomplish. There's never someone whose job is to improve the codebase and the tooling, even when it can benefit the team.

[auxym]

I have not worked in software for long (a year, a while ago) but my experience with agile at that time was that even if you realize that you can and should fix something, you still have do political representation to the scrum master, team lead and product manager so that an issue (sorry, user story) is created and gets prioritized (over features and other bugs) in a future sprint.

Going rogue and spending an afternoon fixing stuff without an approved US (to charge time on) was not seen well.

[julius_set]

Unfortunately this is often the case at larger companies, unless you find a really cool manager / PM to work under who just trusts you — note this can be achieved over time.

I’m talking from personal experience of going rogue :)