[elevatedastalt]

Usually most engineers have some slack time and can pick things up to fix. The problem is not in them doing that. The issues arrises in one of two things—

[1] They either use the fact that they are fixing that thing as an excuse to not work on or deliver on time a different, more important task. If that happens, obvious questions about prioritization occur.

[2] They want a substantial amount of credit or recognition for doing it. Usually such fixes don't receive exec attention (since execs are tracking more important projects) and so don't get the same due as a properly tracked project does.

[wbl]

3: the fix is easy but the integration testing and deployment cannot happen without allocated time.

[titusjohnson]

In my experience this aspect is chronically underestimated by devs. The change needs testing. Change Management might need to create artifacts. Help articles might need updating. Certain clients may need a heads-up. All the PMs need to be briefed (this change is outside of their roadmap so it'll be a fun surprise).

As an org grows the piece of the Effort Pie that is Development gets smaller and smaller. It's not that development gets easier, it's that every other part of the process grows in size and importance faster than the Development piece grows.

It takes about an hour of developer time to incidentally produce 20 hours of work elsewhere in the company.