throwawayzza

This is a very good point but none of the things you mentioned are happening to other people (code review, QA, merge, deploy). Maybe that clarifies the kind of environment I'm working with.

In any case, I understand that even if more work is not being done, more stress is being caused because people just assume things will break in unimaginable ways. I can appreciate how that would be a problem for others.

> everyone else sees you as an unpredictable wildcard causing confusion and extra work

Thanks for the harsh truth. Would you say the kind of work I'm doing has a place in any other type of company? Or at all?

I think I see a lot of tech debt and I want to solve it. I'll admit there are situations where I'm purely being extra zealous and I shouldn't and I'm trying to work on that.

I agree with the micro-management part too. If at least we were aligned and I was micro-managed for doing things management and I agree on, it wouldn't feel so bad. But the way things are right now, I feel like I might get fired for doing extra work, which is a first for me.

I've been told the things I raise as necessary to be done "will be done in the future" but they never are and I'm not given good reasons for why not. Most of the time it's because people don't consider them important (see my other comment for examples).

So I kind of rebel against that in a way and, while I think my output is better, I'm not appreciated for that and worse, might get reprimanded.

There's definitely some of that.

>If I may ask: how are the sprint tasks different from the other small things you feel compelled to do?

Sprint tasks are almost always about new features. The other tasks are more about maintenance and tech debt.

For example, my Sprint task will be about feature X. When I'm adding tests for X, I realize this particular repo has been neglected and is using very outdated dependencies, not following CI best practices we're using everywhereetc. So doing all that slows me down but I feel it's the right thing to do. Others disagree and don't see any problem with that.

Or our monitoring system started to spill out false positives a lot (or I took a look at that just this week), and I need to adjust things so the oncall doesn't keep being woken up unnecessarily. Or worse, they just keep pushing the ignore button.

Or the code I'm working on is using a database that's behind updates and is missing security updates.

There's a lot of yak shaving if I'm to look at the whole thing and feel proud about it.